Biting The Bullet: getting a Windows 10-native box due to Window 7 end-of-support

Short Report: buying and setting up the hardware was the usual three hour configuration process for a new box - but the discovery of a new OS was also usual in that one discovers yet again how Microsoft is always able to make some things marginally worse. And when it didn't really have to.

Longer Version: I got a fresh build of Win10 (not an upgrade from 7 or 8) from Office Depot's website's off lease resale page. My alternates were Tiger Direct, Micro Center and discountelectronics.com and they are probably equally trustworthy (although in my experience the last one listed has the fastest delivery time). Office Depot probably was the low price leader but took 10 days to deliver from a 3rd party refurbisher. Quality of the box was very good.

Sequence of events:

1. physical hookup and establishing of user account
2. Windows updates and related reboots
3. installation of other browser of preference
4. installation of duckduckgo and/or startpage.com search into browser of preference
5. installation of BrightFort Spyware Blaster (malware install preventer)
6. installation of Safer-Networking Spybot Anti-Beacon (blocks lots of Win10 chatty telemetry)
7. installation of other 3rd party things like openoffice.org, Audacity audio recorder, antivirus...
8. installation of iTunes VIA HAVING TO GOOGLE FOR Win10 INSTALLER rather than go through MS Store from Apple link
9. do 1st snapshot with BrightFort Spyware Blaster (a kind of short config backup)
10. do real backup (discovering that one outboard device had no Win10 driver available; used another that did)
11. test programs like mrt, disk utilities etc. to see if they work.
12. discover that "Photos", the replacement for Windows Photo Viewer, is clunkier and less stable
13. realize that "Backup" hid the control for "run now" in the More Options menu, which is stupid
14. realize that "Photos" sometimes wants connectivity to no useful purpose
15. move in remaining amount of needed data from other places if you require it

The more things change, the more they stay the same.