But you already did. You said it primarily is a hardware issue.
I don't disagree hardware issues can tank a system, but generally that should be obvious and right away, not getting worse as time goes on. A number of problems are more and more increasing as updates are pushed, so Windows 10 is breaking more compatibility. The same streamer after updates suddenly can't play any of his older games. By older I mean as far as Morrowind, Fallout 3 / New Vegas, Skyrim, Saints Row games, etc. Yet work perfectly fine before. So something is broken. Maybe it's related to the video drivers, or maybe it has to do with DirectX updates, but something was working and then doesn't anymore, but works again when you roll back.
Depends. Software 30 years old can still be relevant today, so just
'being current' isn't a trend I care about. I shove all my settings to performance and drop visual eye candy, so my system looks very much like Windows 98. I'm more than happy to do commandline-only work which is far from current (
yet in my opinion more advanced), and even use kernels and software 10+ years old if it does the job I want. In this case being
'current' is a stupid argument. A word processor is
still a word processor. Unless sufficiently new features are required or needed, updating is pointless.
XP as such offers a lot of good
GUI and
OS features without being so bloated, and runs amazingly well with few resources on a
VM.
You should try doing programming and using
REALLY old utilities, like Sed and Awk, those were written in the 80's (
and have been kept updated but otherwise haven't changed too much). They can provide tons of useful stuff and code.