I recently was given this HP Pavilion i7.
It came with W7 Home and all the wonderful HP bloatware.
The 1 TB hard drive was a mess from everybody in the family mucking about, torrents etc..
So I pulled it and put in a new SSD drive. As you all know you can't use the original OME OS as it is stored in a partition. HP would send the disk for $50. Screw that.
out comes the handy cracked W7 DVD.
It took FOREVER to get W7 up and running. And I had to manually download and install each and every driver from the HP website. It was about a week before I was trying it out as my possible new DAW machine.
While I was looking for answers for manually downloading updates for W7 the MS site window begging me to update pops up and I wonder, how much is W10 now?
This led me to a small corner of the MS community where they explained how you get W10 for free still.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/accessibility/windows10upgrade So I did this and you know, I installed W10 for free and everything worked instantly. No driver issues, nothing, huge time saver is all I can say, I loved W7 but it's now off my list of OS's to use unless no other choice.