Funny thing is that is kind of what pushed me to 10, I do so far prefer 10 for the upgrades like booting my pc in 5 seconds compared to 7 which took like 15 to 20, increased fps in games, older games work now that did not on 7, and just the modern ui, was not bad.. I do miss my windows 7 but god damn I hated that windows not finding updates for 5 hours.

What can I say ? I trusted MS regarding DOS 2.0, 3.1, 5.0 and 6.2, then regarding Windows 3.11, 95 and 98. Then that trust was damaged by Millenium, restored by XP, redamaged by the tactics used to push Vista ( upgrades gradually ruining your install ), I stayed away from Vista, got 7 but with some distrust, just to go beyond the point of no return with the inclusion of telemetry and other darwinian nightmares. So ,yeah, dual boot 7 / Opensuse is what I'm using now ;-) , except on my "business"laptop ( read bought at my cost, but with specs allowing connection with corporate systems ) where I was forced into Win 10 a few months ago

With the exception of DOS 2.0-3.1, virtually everything you said mirrors my experience pretty much exactly. I stuck with XP primarily because it did everything I needed just fine and any quirks it had were manageable in the latter years of its support. I didn't find it materially lacking in features or other aspects for my needs, so I decided that I had no reason to upgrade it to something newer - until I had a reason to, plus because my computer was older and the newer OSs had higher system requirements I would either have to upgrade the hardware I had or expect a terrible degradation in performance that would make the system unusable. It already was struggling to run games and certain other software so upgrading just the OS was not an option, but continuing to use XP worked fine for most things, just not games and a couple other apps, which were ultra-slow. But upgrading was a non-starter too as the system was so old that "upgrade" basically meant "remove DVD writer, throw PC in the basement, build entirely new PC and install DVD writer" which I had no compelling reason to do - until I had a compelling reason to do it. :)

The compelling reason to finally upgrade ended up being a hardware reason - my GPU died, along with a RAM stick which meant seriously degraded performance that was becoming increasingly unusable. I knew I had to start planning to build a new system or I'd end up downgrading to other even older and even less capable hardware I have, which was a non-starter. Plus, it was early 2013 and I knew XP only had one more year of official life left in it so I knew I'd have to change my OS within a year anyway and the most viable thing at the time was Windows 7. So I built the new PC and a buddy gave me one of his Windows 7 license keys which sunk the deal. Overall the hardware and OS change went remarkably well I must say and I felt and still feel that "Windows 7 is the new Windows XP" so to speak.

But now I feel as you say WRT to the telemetry but I think you might have meant Orwellian nightmares. :) I run about 6-8 Linux virtual machines on this desktop mostly running CentOS 6 and 7, 2 of which are developmental desktop VMs for application development and web development. While I have other Linux desktop VMs I use for certain compartmentalized usage contexts, I plan on increasing the number of them over time and also eventually building a new dedicated Linux desktop PC however that's low priority for now, but as 2020 nears it will become increasingly more important to me for sure. :)

I wont be forced to use Windows 10 on my desktops or other machines, however I will probably end up forced to have at least one Windows 10 virtual machine at some point as a business necessity for compatibility testing of website development as I'll need to ensure things work on Firefox/Chrome/IE/Edge on all supported OSs, so I may end up needing that - but it will be severely isolated if and when that time comes, and wont be used for anything _but_ web testing and most likely firewalled off the Internet completely. Even then only kicking and screaming. :)

If the trend continues in tomorrow's news - Decline free offer updates to Windows 10 and charges you money.

I know that.

IMO, this is worse than the SecuROM fiasco. What do you think?

There is no need to go back. The transition went so smooth, I'm surprised I didn't do it years ago.
(no need to sorry!)
FrankenJessie to be exact, I had to make some changes to make her fit my needs : )

Tried this? Though for me for the past couple of months at least the regular monthly updates only had it stuck at searching for a few minutes, after it had gotten from the initial 15-20 min after the problem appeared to over a full hour just before it got better. And now this month's non-critical update bundle (first one of its kind, since they decided to no longer offer them separately for 7 either) claims to include a fix for it. Not the first time an update claims to fix it, mind you. But not installing a bundle. If no longer offered separately, I just ignore the whole thing.
Either way, if the problem is an update made automatically regardless of settings, the problem will appear on clean installs unless you stay disconnected and then mitigate the issue, such as in the way listed there. So any other fixes won't help with that once it happened.

Really? I thought it was the other way round. Can you give us some examples? (Not denying what you're saying. Truly interested.)

I wonder, has anyone had the "checking for windows updates forever" issue with windows 8.1?

just with windows 7
though it just takes ages it does finally update after several hours

Still like that then. Interesting.

yeh
there are two theories bout this i found
they are doing it on purpose to force to upgrade to windows 10

or the updater has to trawl through thousands and thousands of different permutations and updates for that specific machine

my 7's are oems that came with their machines so there might be some merit in that

Or the windows update protocol changed, and you need an update to Windows Update for updates to work properly again. Fortunately you can download the update directly from the web. If only I knew the KB number I could tell you where.

And I bet MS never bothered updating their infrastructure before unleashing the horrible 10. But if we go for the conspiracy theory, why leave 8.1 alone? What do they gain from it that they can't gain from 7?
According to the link Cavalry posted, one has to download KB3083710 and KB3102810 themselves, disconnect from the internet and install them manually before using windows update. I've no idea how to manually install these though. But the issue isn't whether the update protocol changed, it's that they fail or "fail" to fix it.