Jonathan: Over the years I’ve learnt to recognize and accept the inevitable, where there’s little choice but to grit one’s teeth and adopt some ‘innovation’ which though ill-suited to our circumstances, would cost more to circumvent than to tolerate. As far as computers and operating systems are concerned, the compromise I’ve adopted is to adopt new operating systems when replacement of the computer itself is necessary. Unfortunately I seem to have allowed Microsoft to entice, cajole or bribe me into setting aside my better judgement and install Windows 10 on a Windows 7 computer that is already 3yrs old.  I wish I hadn’t.  The first thing I noticed – when it was already too late to cancel the whole thing – was how they were trying to sneak past me as ‘express basic settings’ or something similar the most outrageously intrusive configuration, ‘sharing’ with Microsoft (in fact actually allowing them to use) a huge raft of very personal information – on profiles, contacts, computer usage, location, and much much more.  I’ve subsequently discovered how deeply buried and opaque system configuration is with Windows 10 – even compared to Windows 7, and how difficult it is to change these things, so I’m glad I followed my usual practice of always chosing custom configuration. However I now find that was not the end of it. The installation screwed up country/region, language, date/time and input methods configuration (partially US, partially UK: for heavens sake can’t Microsoft manage to read and preserve the intent of existing configuration files created by their own previous operating system!) and I’ve been unable to clean that up entirely. But what’s really annoying me is the huge number of ‘apps’ which are cloud-based, including contacts, emails etc: you have to have a Microsoft account to use these.  All my adult life I’ve been an early adopter – but a critical early adopter: so let no-one accuse me of being a luddite, technophobe, or old fuddy-daddy. But the idea of trusting these big corporations with all our stuff just so that we can (allegedly) do our thing ‘seamlessly’ on numerous different devices is simply out of the question. For heaven’s sake even the Windows spell-checker custom dictionaries are cloud-based! So as I won’t be using OneDrive (I have used DropBox for work purposes), or OneNote, or People, or Calendar (for all of which I have perfectly satisfactory stand-alone products) I’ve been uninstalling them as far as that is possible (and some of these things can’t be uninstalled) ; but as I’ve been doing that I find that Windows 10 is forever downloading and re-installing updates of them, and other ‘new’ applications that I’m not remotely interested in (I have better things to do than play on-line games or bend and twist my daily life into the structures of some PDA that’s supposedly indispensible to life in Shanghai or Sheffield).  I think our next operating system is likely to be much more basic and practical, probably an open-source community system, eg Linux or Ubuntu, as almost all the applications I use are of the same class, eg Open Office, Thunderbird, Firefox, QIS.  I want my computer and applications to be just tools to help me achieve my own ideas and requirements, not make me a zombie dancing to the tune of corporate executives and shareholders of California.