Since Microsoft has discontinued support for Windows/7 (and all earlier versions), we're all now forced to "upgrade" to Windows/10.
Having just done so, I'm finding it even more horrible than I expected.
These are just some of the things I have had to do to compensate for the regressions in Win/10 over what worked perfectly well in Win/7:
I run my Firefox browser on a second monitor. But if Win/10 goes to sleep, or if I close the laptop lid to put the computer to sleep, when I reopen the lid, Win/10 wakes up and then moves all the windows on the 2nd monitor to the laptop screen. I have to use MonitorKeeper64.exe running hidden to automatically move those windows back to the correct monitor. But because the 2 screens have different resolutions, I had to write my own hidden program to then automatically resize the windows that are now on the 2nd monitor back to their original size.
If Win/10 goes to sleep (e.g. I close the laptop lid), when I reopen the lid, Win/10 wakes up but I then have to unplug and replug my USB LAN dongle to get it working again. My workaround is to now plug the LAN dongle into my USB-C hub; that fails less often.
I frequently use Atl+TAB to switch between windows. In Win/10 the bar that appears for showing the available windows is a collection of thumbnails of those windows - and most of them just look like a white rectangle with black writing on it. I have to look very closely to distinguish among them. So I hacked the registry to go back to the Win/7 bar of icons which makes it much easier to distinguish my choices.
I use subst drives - a lot. Native Win/10 subst is basically unusable. I switched to using psubst.exe instead.
It seems you cannot start Taskmgr automatically at startup in the Programs > Startup Folder. I can start it in the batch file I automatically run at boot up - but it won't start minimized (or maximized) nor in the More Details view. So I made a a Ctrl+Alt hot key for it. But ,,,
I use Ctrl+Alt hotkeys - a lot (I have 40 of them). But Win/10 would pause for 3 seconds upon every use - not acceptable. A little research uncovered C:\Windows\ImmersiveControlPanel\SystemSettings.exe as the culprit.
This can be turned off via Start > PC Settings > Privacy > Background apps and toggle Settings OFF. Problem solved.
[I also have a batch file with the command:
taskkill /IM SystemSettings.exe /F
which I can run to killoff Settings if necessary.]
While I was turning off Settings (see above) I turned off a lot of other useless junk that was running in the background. Why should any of that junk be running if I have never executed those programs! Why should any of those programs be running in the background at all? They are just there to make Microsoft programs look like they start a little faster - but I have an SSD, so the speed increase is negligible and they are just sitting there wasting my computer resources. I turned them all off via the top toggle at Start > PC Settings > Privacy > Background apps.
One of the things I use Ctrl+Alt hotkeys for is to position my cursor at specific places on my screens. Because my 2 screens have different resolutions and different scales, I had to rework SetCurPos to actually position the cursor twice (first to get it to the correct screen, then to the correct position).
I use a DOS box for much of my work - but not the Windows one, one I wrote myself: CMDer. I had to fix a bug in the double click handling that only showed up in Win/10.
I have lots of batch files that invoke the command line ftp command. They build text files that are redirected as input to ftp. In Win/7 when the password was required, ftp would ask me for it, so the password was not part of the batch file nor the generated text file. But in Win/10 the password has to be in the text file. So I had to write a little program that would get called at the correct time in the running of an ftp batch file to get the password to inject into the text file - and then make sure I delete the text file at the end of the batch file as soon as ftp finishes.
Transferring files between my Android phone and Win/10 is ridiculous. On Win/7 I could just plug in my phone to a USB post, set File Transfer on the phone and Explorer would see my phone and I could transfer files. That does not work on Win/10. I finally stumbled into being able to see my phone by accident: click Start > Settings > Control Panel > Devices and Printers. My phone shows up here and sometimes it give me the option when I right click on the phone to Browse Files. If it does, then I can obtain an Explorer window to access the phone's files. But sometimes I have to reboot my computer and try again to get the Browse Files menu item. I've found no less that 15 different suggestions on the internet for trying to solve this problem.
The Timer function (e.g. SetTimer()) on Win/10 stops running when the computer goes to sleep. This is Not the case for Win/7 or Linux. I had to add code to my timer program (TodayAt) to work around this Win/10 bug.
And finally, the MS Edge browser cannot open an HTML file on my local hard drive. This is for security, I guess. But when 'security' intrudes so much that a product is unusable, well, let's just say a brick is really secure, it never gets viruses, etc. but it's totally useless for accessing the internet.
Yes, I know some of these things are very geeky - but I should not have to use my computer in a stupid way just because the OS has gotten far more stupid. And this list does not begin to address all the things I had to do to try to recover my privacy, figure out where various setting are now located, turn off junk (like Cortana) that I'll never use, etc.
Doing a little research on dealing with Win/10 has uncovered the following:
Leigh Brasington
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/ Revised 19 May 20