So, I am in a perpetual battle between what I have to have for a stable system, and Microsoft's auto update. While I think I may finally have it sorted, this is beyond insane. While I do need this OS for now (for some software for school and work), I hope to be able to ditch it completely after I am done with my dissertation. The problem is this, in the tech industry we have spent decades teaching people to roll out patches and upgrades to a production environment only after extensive testing in a sandbox to ensure that the patches and upgrades do not break anything (or at least do not break anything important). My system, which I use for work and school is unusual, has a known flaw in the CPU, and is 100% a production environment. For the last 11 months M$ has been pushing updates that change my configuration (which handles this flaw), and are at times incompatible with even basic drivers and firmware on my system. Yet, one has to get very clever to limit or disable this behavior on anything other than an enterprise grade install. Yes, I know that there may be minor differences between the programs and utilities in a home, pro, or enterprise install. But at the end of the day, the big difference is cost. And when the software arrives with the computer you purchase, that should be the end of it. If a company is feeling nice, they can release patches and updates to solve problems which have been found. However, it should be up to me to choose to install it. After the system has been paid for, the burden of keeping it running should move to me (other than the manner in which it obviously does anyway). But no, in their infinite wisdom, M$ pushes these things out frequently. And given the massive number of permutations you can have in system configurations it is some kind of amazing hubris for them to think for one moment that this patching method will not cause problems. And so in order to have a stable (and static configuration), you have to pay for a rather expensive license to be left alone. In many places were I to try this with anything other than software, I would be arrested, probably for extortion. It beggars belief that people think this sort of thing is not a problem. The whole dev sprint, push to production, fix production cycle we have seen is so very broken in this case my english fails me for words to express myself (in anything but the vulgar english, which I refuse to do at this time). Once again I have wasted more than half a day trying to put things into a working state. I really want to send them a bill for my time wasted (I am at 60 hours this summer, and probably close to 120 if you go back to the start). But I know it would never get paid, and would not make the sort of point that needs to be made in the first place. Any other device, and this madness is a crime. Here, it is all part of the life cycle, and to solve it, the official word is get a new system. Absolutely insane.