Another thing to keep in mind. You can upgrade, and then revert. Even if you revert to Win 7, your system will be flagged by MS as having upgraded. That means it will be able to upgrade for free in the future, even after the July 29th date.
Just a caution about the Revert within 30 days process... Often it fails, and you must full install Windows 7 from Media... Can be a big PIA... Thurrott had an article about the Convenience Rollup (CR) minimizing the pain as an FYI for those who need to re-install Win7 Cheers Jerry...
I would just revert from backup. The problem with that is that the restore from backup takes hours on my system, so would rather avoid it if at all possible
VLC is excellent... +1 However, don't download anything from Cnet (or any of those download sites, softpedia etc...)... it bundles spam & adware (crapware/malware) into the downloads... Always go direct to developers site, in this case VLC
I was having major problems with Windows 7 on my email/surf laptop, it had gotten stuck in middle of re-installing Windows 7, had tech guy reinstall Windows 7 three times and it just ran clunky, so upgraded to ten, and runs so much faster, but I am not going to upgrade other machines till I buy new laptops end of the year. I think Windows ten is harder to get around even after five months, but it not like I am using it but couple hours a day.
I have just installed GWX Control Panel, that gets ride of the forced upgrade. There is also another similar program called Never 10. http://ultimateoutsider.com/downloads/
Interesting that most of the naysayers I saw in other Windows 10 related threads have all quieted down or outright shut up. I am not a fan of bloatware or being abused as information provider for Microsoft's effort to suck information from its users but here my experience with Win 10 and other platform recently. - I just updated my desktop PC hardware (used for research purposes for which I need a Win OS). I got a Skylake CPU, 32gb ddr4 ram, a Nvidia 980Ti card (I perform a lot of AI research using TensorFlow and Theano that make use of GPU cores). I also have a number monitors hooked up for discretionary trading (most all my algorithmic trading runs on remote servers). My Nvidia 980Ti supports 4 independent monitors out of the box and the other 4 monitors are driven via USB-HDMI or USB-DP adapters (I prefer the Plugable brand). -> All hardware components were instantly recognized by Windows 10 though I did install some drivers to avoid potential issues later on down the road. Also the sleep function works without a hitch (I had problems with waking up my PC for years under Windows 7 but most likely the culprit was that I used 2-3 video cards before to drive those many screens. Now I just have one single video card (I do not even use the internal GPU that came with my mainboard) and the USB-Video adapters. So far my experience with Windows 10 has been very positive - Regarding Linux, I run Ubuntu on a separate hard drive with UEFI boot menu where I can choose to either boot into Linux or Windows. I do not like the current VM environments because there are still issues with accessing hardware components directly (especially Nvidia cards in order to access GPU cores via CUDA). That works fine, both OSs co-exist just fine - Warning to all, I just bricked a high spec Samsung Laptop when I installed Linux Mint on it. The problem is well documented (pls PM me if you are interested). After installing Linux Mint I could not access my laptop bios anymore. Not even resetting the CMOS or bios saved my laptop. The warranty expired and I had to pretty much discard an otherwise fully functional laptop. Trust me when I say that I am a pretty advanced user and programmer and tried everything under the sun to save the laptop. First time I ever came across a software install that can pretty much kill a whole hardware setup.
Most likely because the Linux path they all went did in the end not really solve their problems (most trading related apps, Excel APIs, Reuters Eikon, BBG, ..., still prefer to run on Windows platforms). But maybe also because Windows 10 in the end did not turn out so bad as many feared...Linux has its place but it is definitely not the platform of choice for most traders (else why does nobody at front offices trade off a linux machine...). But hey, I do not want to start an OS war (which can never be settled). Use whatever suits you best, for me Windows 10 does a pretty decent job and I like it. I just shared my experience.