To be honest Sebby as I said with the add thing and installing c cleaner, I install c cleaner on any machine as a matter of course. I've got it on this xp laptop and have been using it for quite a while, ever since Avg Pc tuneup buggered their interface and became slow as a hog in january in fact, and as I said I didn't see removal of the stuff that the pc came with aka, companies who paid microsoft for free advertising as anything that different to what I was used to.

With the spyware business I can't speak since it's just not something I've noticed, then again i do intend to carry on backup by usb and keep as much of my personal data, especially sensative stuff like bank information off the computer as possible. Other spyware I'm not really too certain of at this point.

In terms of adaptation, as you might recall I was investigating getting a mac back in early 2015 since we were finally at a point when the actual upgrade actually did! something worth while and of practical value. Unfortunately that plan got rather scuppered by various other more important things going on in my life at the time and I didn't consider things again until Dolphin offered their sn 16 upgrade complete with a pc attached (which sort of back fired, but hay).

Also i think a lot of it is to do with the fact that I much prefer the layout of windows 10 to windows 7, at least with the classic shell start menu (and in fairness I did try to use the regular start menu too, indeed I've just bought a stand mike and it'll be interesting to see what I can get Cortana to do).

Well Sebby I will admit that Windows 10 has been far less problematic than I thought especially in terms of layout, the moral of the story seems to be that I should've tried the dam thing out rather than assuming what I'd seen on windows 7 which I disliked also held true for windows 10. Then again Microsoft have said the layout of windows 10 is staying know, and while we all know what ms are like for their promises it does seem a reasonable bet that working with windows 10 will be a good idea for the forseeable future.

As  far as email goes I don't know whether to try the freeware outlook express or thunderbird, we'll have to see. One thing I really! miss from outlook express is the dropdown  contacts list and the ability to select a message ricipient without being always tied to auto complete, but we'll see, indeed I still haven't got to grips with all the ins and outs of Nvda yet and how to run it with different programs and window types.

I also want to try liber office, since I have heard it doesn't interfere with formatting and doc layout. I was concerned given that my Phd thesis is very specifically formatted being a highly formal academic document, but ultimately it won't hurt to try, (especially since hopefully my doctorate will actually be finished soon),  and I really don't want to pay microsoft a hundred quid or fourty quid a year if I can help it, especially since I don't use xl, outllook i actively dislike and the only part of office I really want is the word processing.

As to mac, I did heavily consider mac, but I didn't fancy the idea of having to run a virtual machine whenever I wanted to play windows related games, plus when I tried a mac it did seem the basic speech navigation keys for voiceover were a little complex.
This isn't to knock anyone who uses a mac, indeed I suspect were I coming to the hole thing afresh I'd probably have chosen mac instead of Windowsbut support for the programs I already have and familiarity with screen readers and layout sort of biased me on the matter.

Well Cae personally I think nintendo should still! be making games for my snes and ggb advanced rather than all this 3d nonsense that I can't play, indeed it was lack of playable games that got me into audiogames in the first place .
I agree very much with the sentiment, but in terms of windows 10 I will say that the benifits of having a newer os did outway the amount of newer stuff I wanted to do on xp and couldn't, that combined with the compatibility fixes out there for most games etc did sway me towards the decision for a windows 10 machine.

Ultimately of course the process of upgrades comes down to forced monopoly having control of a captive audience to effectively sell a product not because people need it but because the seller simply can invalidate people's existing systems, but the problem comes when that forced monpoly actually provides something useful as opposed to simply changing things for the sake of making changes as unfortunately is more than often the case, and as I said, while I was not a fan of windows 7 I seem to be getting on fairly well with windows 10, ---- though that doesn't stop me still wanting more new games for my snes! .

Dos games are I think the one area where xp is still necessary, t hose and the classic bsc titles (though imho the second versions were better). However I'd personally prefer if the community got a good solution up and running for talking dosbox to play games like fallthru and eamon deluxe, than xp virtualization, after all ot everyone will be willing to do the virtual os thing, but everyone will be having windows 10 for the forseeable future so it's a good investment, just like the compatibility fixes Jim and Aprone included in their games.