Hello again cynwulf. I hope you and your loved ones are happy and healthy. Best wishes.

I really don't care about the money. I'm aware that for little or nothing I can "upgrade" to Win10. I'm also aware that I am choosing a much harder path because of my own prejudice against and resentment toward Microsoft. I really don't want to accede to that despicable Win10 EULA. Additionally and in response to your hesitant inquiry I have run WINE for almost 20 years. Steam's Proton solved any need to run windows for gaming. The only remaining issues for which I still want to run any version of Windows is 1) an old but potent DAW app that I paid over $1000.00 USD for that still has some features I can't duplicate with a FOSS app (and yes, I have run Ardour since before it was Alpha... didn't even have install instructions yet). and 2) Some hardware has Windows-only apps, especially firmware oriented, that are quite useful for deep work and some settings are toggled and persist even when running in Linux afterward.

It's quite possible that within the next handful of years that Linux will exceed some threshold of user base that will get enough vendor attention the firmware issue will become optional and as I'm no longer doing DAW work as a profession that need may disappear as well. In the meantime I feel somewhat challenged to keep what I have and not just give up on it.

FINAL RANT - I managed to get new USB3 drivers installed in Win7 (odd how the previous working USB3 drivers worked until recent "update") and upon reboot they were gone. I dug through "regedit" and discovered they are all locked out at registry level. I may hack around a bit more but right now I feel like a guy who owns a 60s muscle car and some guy from Ford/GM comes around regularly to put sugar in my gas tank and slash my tires. Kinder, Gentler MS indeed! They couldn't pay me to install Windows 10.