The most important advice, as already mentioned or alluded to:
Turn off auto-updates, both the smaller as well as the bigger supposed "crucial" ones. Despite Microsoft's claims you don't actually need any of them, and all they do is messing with your configuration/settings and making sure that, especially older games that used to work just fine the other day don't work anymore on the next.

I'm still on last year's version 1909 and never had encountered any problems in this regard.

If possible keep the machine Win10 is on completely offline, for the maximum protection against Win10's numerous ways of "phoning home" to Redmond.

You also might want to use any existing Win7 licenses to just upgrade to Win10. If you don't want to give Microsoft any more money, that is.

Just download a corresponding Win10 ISO (Professional, Home or whatever the Win7 license can be used with) from the internet, slap that onto a USB stick or burn it onto a double-layer DVD and install from there. When asked for the license key use your old Win7 one and voila.
Still needs to be activated though, so you'd either have to connect the machine briefly to the internet for that or go the alternate route where activation can be done via telephone.

Are you sure about that? It's quite easy to use the search bar and pinned taskbar shortcuts to do pretty much everything you need to do. Most gamers use clients to launch their games. I don't really see the start menu being that useful anymore outside of something like Surface.

I hate this so much that most of the time I just use Winaero Tweaker, or the so called God Mode shortcut, when I need to change some settings.

Yeah, seems so, or maybe they installed the Classic/OpenShell and totally forgot about it.

It's indeed very good. I'm glad you found it.

Using 7 at home and (being forced to) 10 at work.

I still think 10 looks really ugly, I detest this flat look they came up with 8, and which 10 continued. Give me real buttons and window borders!
I also find this terrible from a pov of usability: If you have many windows open (which happens a lot when I work) it's all clear and structured in 7, terribly cluttered in 10.

I'd recommend, as others, to get shutup10 or other tools to minimize the spying. Also never forget to check all those privacy settings again after each fucking update, since Microsoft just loves to reset them. :-(

Also, if you don't turn automatic updates off, set them to "postpone". Wait for the wailing and gnashing of teeth from other users after updates and then decide if you want to do it. QA has become horrible or non-existent at MS, some updates even wiped users' complete documents.

If you want Win 10 to look like 7, you can use Open Shell.

And then there's programmers who use a Bash Shell to link things together.

Also half the time double-clicking a icon the extention will auto-run the appropriate program.

So... once you get set up, i don't see why you would need it. I end up using it only when i have to find some obscure program i installed a while back and use once a year or something.

I am almost ashamed to say it but after my Windows 7 install got corrupted, I was forced to turn to the other half of my dual boot; Windows 10... but yes, I also highly recommend Winaero and Classic Start Menu. Win 10 isn't too bad, it's just that, as timppu mentioned, settings/config are all over the place... it's like it was made by people who had their own modules and none communicated across.

- Turn off updates, telemetry, and cortana completely.
- Turn off windows search (indexing) and use Everything .
- Setup time server from this list: https://www.pool.ntp.org/en/
- Set power plan to Performance.
- Disable startup programs you don't need
- Turn off System Restore and Optimize drives.
- Turn off zip compressed folders
- Turn on file extensions (MS made a terrible decision to turn this off by default, security wise)
- Use TinyWall to manage the internal one and add more security, like stopping software from phoning home.
- If on laptop, turn off mic and webcam(!)
- Also recommended:
Dism++
GeekUninstaller
Game Backup Monitor (To auto-backup savefiles)
BleachBit
Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder
F.lux

https://www.nirsoft.net/ and https://portableapps.com/ - One of the best collection of tools.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3250464/faq-windows-10-ltsb-explained.html

+1 for portable apps! I have a 125gb superspeed pen drive specifically for portableapps. Have loads installed on it from utilities to programming environments. In fact anything portable goes on there, sharp develop for instance (I wish they had kept that going, it’s cracking for simple projects).
Did not know about nirsoft, will add to list.

The one thing I hated initially about Windows 10 was the fact that some of the components from Windows 7 (specifically .Net Framework 3.5) were not included in the standalone installer, and thus if you tried to install W10 on a standalone PC (i.e. not connected to the internet), the necessary files were not available, AND W10 prevented you from installing said software from official standalone files. This actually prevented me from using quite a bit of the software I had at the time, and needless to say I was not pleased (and my initial efforts to rectify the situation on a standalone OEM PC with DISM wizardry failed due to the current installation being incompatible).

Aside from some of the good advice mentioned by previous posters, I would suggest (if you got the version 2004 update) that under Graphics Settings turn Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling off. Why? The feature was supposed to provide a minor performance boost for gaming. For some of my newer games like Death Stranding of the RE3 remake, there were no problems. But, much to my surprise, a slew of my older games (Ys VIII, Ys VII, Ys Memories of Celceta) just stopped working. I was quite concerned that I had somehow screwed up my games, but when I realized that this only happened when I turned the feature on, I quickly turned it off, and and everything was back to normal. Perhaps that might not happen on your machine (and I don't think I've heard of this happening to anyone else), but it's just something to take note of.

+1

Got a combined download to share? Not sure i'd need all the tools, but certainly sounds promising.

For a computer i worked on, i followed instructions on where the cortana exe was at... Then killed the process repeatedly until i could delete the executable. Cortana gone! Problem solved. (Takes like 6 attempts to get it)

I'm probably going to have to do 10 soon, so I'm bookmarking this thread for later.

In 7, you could use "compatability mode" to help some older games work. Does this still exist / work in 10?

With how they push/force updates that break compatibility... i'm going to guess no...

But i could be wrong.

I still don't see how you could have avoided using the start menu at all for a decade. Yes you can either pin to taskbar or make desktop shortcuts (which in itself is a different process in Windows 7 vs 10; in 7 you can e.g. right-drag a shortcut from the Start menu to the desktop and tell it to either copy the shortcut or create a new shortcut; the same does not work in Windows 10) for often used applications, but when you e.g. need to change some setting that you don't access that often, the normal way is to search for it from the Start menu.

Sounds to me like claiming that e.g. Linux Mint XFCE user interface is "virtually indistinguishable" from Windows 10 or 7 user interfaces because the same arguments work there too: you can access your often-used applications by either creating desktop shortcuts or pin them to the taskbar (just like you can in Windows, and I feel this is even easier in Mint XFCE as you just right-click on the start menu item and it has both options right there, "Add to desktop" and "Add to panel (="taskbar")", none of this dragging around the icons etc.), and the Steam client running in Linux doesn't differ at all from the Windows version.

I guess it depends how you define "virtually indistinguishable". It is true that it took only one minute for my wife to learn how to use Linux for her daily task (she had used only Windows PCs before that), I mainly had to just teach her how to log in to the system and how she can start different applications she uses daily, mainly the Firefox or Chromium browser. Oh and how to log out and shut down the PC after she is done.

So, is Linux "virtually indistinguishable" from Windows 7/10, from the user point of view?