Long story short, 'current' Dell Inspiron carked it, a Lenovo Thinkpad seemed like a far more durable replacement. Issue is, even when installed correctly with the Windows 7 drivers, the machine just doesn't quite work correctly - Unable to adjust screen brightness, hotkeys not working, physical Wi-Fi switches not toggling the Wi-Fi off, all sorts of little niggles. GPU drivers didn't seem to want to install, even in spite of being slipstreamed onto the installation USB. And I wasn't aware of the Windows 7 Pro downgrade programme until after I purchased the machine. If someone here, somehow, does have the knowledge of getting Windows 7 working properly, that'd be grouse. But I seriously doubt it'll be a reasonable request, or an easy fix. :v:/>/>/> Anyway! Windows 10! What're people's suggestions for making the Operating System, I daresay, look and feel better. I'm already a bit dismayed at the lack of Classic or Aero themes, but I've worked around that best I can. I've already got Classic Shell working it's magic, best as it can. Google searching, and a friend, suggests running TronScript, to alleviate most complaints with the Operating System. Reading through what it does, it does seem mostly agreeable. But I would like to hear others thoughts on it before running it. Beyond that, I'm rather a tad unsure. Is there anything nasty I should look out for? Any suggestions for what I should do with it? I've been running Windows 7, with the Classic skin - no less - for so long, no less, that this is actually quite scary. I'd bloody appreciate some help! EDIT: Ran the TronScript, worked pretty well.
My improvement would be a format and installing 7 :v: TronScript I've heard good things about, is probably the closest you can get to 10 not sucking.
I seriously did try 7. But, Kaby Lake machine, and my attempt at doing so kinda failing pretty badly. I tell you mate, if I could make 7 work correctly on this laptop, I would. A desktop would be so much less of a pain to deal with.
Just get a cheap old ex-lease desktop for gaming with good old Win 7, and install linux on your laptop for everything else (though you'll probably still have problems with those physical buttons and hotkeys). That's what I do. I'm getting a lot of mileage out of my sub-$200 quad-core pentium desktop (pre i-series). I've updated the GPU twice over the last decade and I can still run the latest games more often than not, which still surprises me to this day. Not in 4k obviously, so it's starting to show its age, but I reckon I can keep going for a while longer yet.
That's pretty much what I've been doing. I even installed an SSD in my i7 950 desktop, just to kick it's inevitable replacing to another few years down the road. :v:/> The laptop end, though. This machine's mostly been used for art-related projects. A bit of an issue when most of your software is proprietary to Windows. Though, given the path Windows is going down... It's definitely going to be a hell of a learning experience. I do have Windows 10 behaving largely as I need it, for now. But there's some incredibly annoying things going on. Especially with taskbar notifications. I have no idea how I got the text anti-aliasing arrangement working on my previous laptop, either. Some fonts would AA, others wouldn't. And it would generally be that fonts that looked good non-AA'd, were not AA'd. And fonts that looked better AA'd, were AA'd. And having everything be blurry and AA'd on this new machine is driving me nuts.
Do you know what annoys me about Windows 10? Is that the settings you change usually ends up getting reverted back. For example: I have disabled both monitors and my microphone for sound as I want my speakers to do the sound. Every random day (and ALWAYS after a Windows update), my monitors will suddenly be re-enabled, so will my mic at times, etc etc. And they even get set as the default device. Why?!
With the Windows 7 drivers, I had luck using a driver updating program since the laptop came with Windows 8 which I hate with a passion. Obviously you can install any version of Windows even though it's 'not supported'.