>>>To put a cherry on the upgrade fracas.. they asked to me to take a survey at the end and that crashed.
>
>LOL. I'm a Windows 7 luddite. Current notepad was the best I could find at the time as I intended it to be my last Windows PC. So far so good- Intel has assisted by deprecating Moore's law and Windows 7 is as good as the day I got it which leaves no good business reason to upgrade. As for Windows 8: when Windows fanbois turn up in forums they've shunned for months, solely to extol the virtues of an OS, you know it's going to be another dud. ;-) So I stayed put.

Not a bad strategy

I was using what was once a nice laptop running Win 7 but the constant updates (I never should have allowed them) crippled that poor laptop and I had to get a faster CPU and a lot more RAM

As you correctly point out this is a poster child for what Bob Davies, founder of SBT, called "The technology treadmill."

Scratch deep enough and it really does little more than XP did- but the hardware requirements are out of sight. Thousands of dollars poured down the drain so that I can be annoyed.

I spent a few hours today turning off "upgrade" offers from MS.
Really, really annoying stuff.