ussnorway: Windows 10 has a bad rep for gaming because it does not support older g-card drivers so if you upgrade a w7 system to wx then sooner or later your task bar will stop working and your games wont boot... all windows os users should install games outside the c programs folder because Microsoft is run by yes men and no body said no when some suit came up with the bright idea to make the programs folder a bad place to put programs.
Sheeesh...;) Win10x64 actually has a very good rep for gaming, at least in my neck of the woods...;) Old GPUs sold during much earlier Windows OS periods--especially those GPUs so old that their manufacturer has already shunted them to "legacy" status (meaning they are no longer being updated to current API support)--will possibly have trouble under Win10 because Win10 is designed to support d3d12 and WDDM 2.0 driver models, neither of which are supported by older GPUs made and sold during the d3d9/10 WinXP/VISTA/Win7 period. That's just a problem with *any* old GPU that has been obsoleted by newer standards. I've upgraded more than one Win7 & Win8/.1 system to Win10 without the problems you report here.
Also, if you can upgrade your old system to Win10 and it runs your games without a problem--then if something should happen *later* so that "your task bar will stop working and your games wont boot"--you can believe it isn't Win10 that's the problem--it's something else in your system that you've installed that is causing those problems--something else you've installed that is not designed to run well/at all in Windows 10 under the WDDM 2.0/1.3 GPU driver models. For some reason I've never understood, people get this idea that if they buy a GPU in 2005 that it should be fully supported and still
State of the Art in 2015...;) Never gonna' happen, and such folks are doomed to long periods of unhappiness, I fear. Of course, it's not inevitable--just try and part with a couple of hundred bucks every 2-3 years and you can stay
State of the Art perpetually! It's up to you. But complaining because the square peg won't fit into the round hole is not apt to take you very far...
Last, you may not have noticed it, but Microsoft has been making a determined effort towards better OS security beginning with Vista onward. Extra security surrounds the C:\ program files (x86) and 64-bit Program directories in the way of implementing better security on the root c:\ drive--for obvious reasons. These more rigorous protections may sometimes get in the way of older games which have to do lots of stuff in the c:\ Program directories but were programmed originally for an OS with far lighter/non-existent security than Win10 provides. As you mentioned, the workaround is something people should be doing anyway--such as having more partitions than only C:\ and keeping their games and programs generally *out* of the c:\ partition altogether. (For years now, the only thing in my c:\ drives on all my machines is the OS, device drivers and utilities. Everything else goes into partition other than c:\. This has benefits especially when your c:\ partition fails for any reason--because then all of your other programs and data *stay up.*
At any rate, the Win10 restrictions on c:\ root directories and so on are
security measures (has nothing to do with "suits") and can often be overcome by simply running your game in the
admin compatibility mode, if you positively absolutely must install your games to c:\program files (x86). Best solution, however, is to develop some new data organization habits and start putting your programs and data on partitions other than c:\ altogether. Works much better than a mega-sized c:\ partition which has to hold everything you put on the 'puter...especially when it's time to back up and restore! "An ounce of forethought is worth several pounds of regret" I've found...;)
Can you tell me, though, why it is than whenever people run across a change in an OS that seems, to them, to have no purpose or reason for being--that people too often assume the change is both arbitrary and meaningless? That rarely happens, actually, as most code organization is the product of a lot of forethought and planning. (Which doesn't mean it's bug-free, but that's a different horse all together.) People might try and think about why some things in OSes change between versions...and why some don't.