Hi Jon, good post but you made me laugh and I spit on my monitor when I got to the part of "a sluggish program like Windows 10". The only reason I'm adding comments to your post is that I'm bringing into my company the next new wave of computing which involves virtualizing all physical workstations. This system has nothing but SSD drives which are on the cusp of being obsolete to be replaced with 16 terabyte memory stick drives. I say memory stick because they look like the memory DIMMs you see in PC's today but each one holds 16TB of data and can be either hard drive space or used as RAM. We can spin up 50 Windows 10 Pro virtual machines in approximately 300 ms. Just 5 years ago a single 500GB SSD would cost upwards of $1,000.
As for staying with Windows 7 versus upgrading to Windows 10, since Microsoft no longer provides security patches for Windows 7, you are just asking to get infected or hacked. It is not a matter of if, but when. Plus it sounds like your 10+ year old PC is really why the new software runs so slow. The internal BUS architecture can't handle the multi-threaded needs of the new Windows 10 environment. My Surface Book II running Windows 10 Pro boots up and is ready to go in less than one minute.
