For Christmas, I just got my wife a Toshiba laptop with Windows 10 preinstalled. She's used to working in a traditonal desktop mode, and she has certain must-have programs that won't even run on Windows 10. All in all, the OS was unacceptable (for us). So, I purchased an OEM version of Windows 8.1, proceeded to re-partition and format the hard drive, and installed Windows 8.1 from scratch. So far, after installing Classic Shell, it's working well. (I copied all the contents to another computer before wiping the hard drive.) It was a lot of work to reinstall all the proper drivers. At least I got rid of all the bloatware.
One of the reasons to go back to Windows 8.1 was that it was the last version to support Media Center Edition. When I went to download and install MCE from Microsoft's web site, I found that they had stopped selling it back in October. Fortunately, I had a product key from an earlier installation, and it worked!
The biggest annoyance of the laptop is the damn touchpad. We just can't get the hang of using it. She's going to be using a regular mouse. The other main issue for us is the lack of Greek letters on the keyboard. I thought about replacing the keyboard with a Toshiba Greek-English keyboard, but doing so involves disassembling practically the entire machine! I'l have to use stick-on overlays even though that is not an elegant solution.
For old folks like us, there's a learning curve with new systems that often is not worth the effort. For example, I don't have a Smart Phone, and I know nothing about Facebook or Twitter. I think my life in general is better without those things!