Yesterday I received a Gigabyte Brix i5 and wanted to run Windows 7. The process was painful.

The Brix has no USB 2.0 ports and no legacy USB in the bios - So keyboard and mouse were non functional. Presumably the ISO was built pre-USB 3.0 era. So I had to customize a untouched image with USB 3 drivers. Drivers had to be downloaded from Gigabytes website. All to learn that MS update doesn't work with Kaby Lake. Great.

Windows 10 setup was quick & easy.

Running 10 feels like I've lost control over my own OS. It updates when it wants and I have no way of turning it off. It is connected to numerous IPs I have no control over except to painfully block in hosts. Onedrive has no official uninstall option, Windows updates can no longer be postponed with 1607 and burns 15-20 mins productivity when restarting. There are a handful of services I don't need or want that I cannot disable (Wifi password sharing anybody?). It is the exact reason why I wanted to run Windows 7 in the first place.

To me it feels like another forceful tactic to push me to use Windows 10 for which I have no desire. Win 7 is supported till 2020 so don't choose for me but that doesn't matter.

I'm sure you've already seen it, but using https://www.winprivacy.de/english-home/ helps alleviate some of these issues. I completely agree with you though, the whole thing feels dirty.

Just finished installing this OS. I generally enjoy MS products but this has changed my opinion. The OS isn't really any faster than 7 and the amount of road blocks I have encountered to change things to how I want them is remarkable.

I have found two great resources if anyone is in the same position as me. For Uninstalling the store bloat and disabling geo-location services and other anti-privacy I used:

1) https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10

disable-services.ps1 and disable-windows-defender.ps1

2) https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script/...

Disabled too many things to list and I'll set this up to run on restart and restrict the file write perms for security. I've used pretty much the defaults but most importantly

"DisableTelemetry", "DisableWiFiSense", "DisableSmartScreen", "DisableWebSearch", "DisableStartSuggestions", "DisableLocationTracking", "DisableFeedback", "DisableAdvertisingID", "DisableCortana", "DisableErrorReporting", "RestrictUpdateP2P", "DisableAutoLogger", "DisableDiagTrack",

3) Glasswire firewall or of your choice to monitor network connections.