There's a good overview of both the good and the bad here.

Also:

Microsoft can disable your pirated games and illegal hardware which is about what you agree to now when you agree to the EULA for Microsoft's Live Services, which includes Cortana, their answer to Siri. What they seem to have done is just copied the EULA from XBox verbatim, and most are assuming that the games and illegal hardware are the kind of stuff XBox hackers are fond of, rather than using a non-certified video card, but who knows.

That Forbes article you link suggests waiting until Ocober to upgrade existing Windows computer - gives them time to get bugs out. If I get her a brand new windows computer I'll probably do the free upgrade as soon as it will let me.

...Win 10...anything else I should watch for?

Managing LANs and wireless connections has become over-simplified, there is little in the way of options, diagnostics, or tools. If you can connect, great, but if you cannot then there is not much you can do about it.

IMHO the amusement provided by Cortana is not worth the resource usage and battery drain.

My 8-year-old 17" laptop has 2GB RAM and a 1.50GHz processor. It came with Vista, and it upgraded to Win7 okay, but Win10 is a bit much for it. I saw noticeable slowdowns with the new Microsoft Edge browser, Windows Explorer, and OpenOffice. I reverted it to Win7 and intend to keep it that way.

This is good info. When I got my new laptop last fall, I special ordered one with Windows 7 because I knew I didn't want 8. Have reserved Windows 10 but haven't upgraded yet. All instincts tell me not to. I don't even use Cortana on my phone.

Also if you're not yet aware of it, although Windows 10 is apparently a great OS, by default all privacy settings are turned off, allowing Microsoft to collect all sorts of data about your mom.

I discovered during the install that is will ask you at some point if you want to use express settings or customize settings. I choose customize and it let me turn on the privacy settings there so I didn't have to hunt them down latter. Windows 10 works just fine on my desktop but it's an i5 with 16GB of RAM (-4GB for the Linux server that runs in a VM) and a SSD so it damn well better run fine.

While it runs just fine, I don't really find anything compelling about it that would make me want to upgrade from 7 or 8. I kinda prefer the Windows 7 start menu too.

If you want to make Windows 8 act like 7, I'd really suggest the Start8 program from Stardock. It has a free trial and is only $5 if you like it. It's a must get for me on any Windows 8 computer.

I feel fine about my current old-ish slightly crappy laptop, so don't plan to upgrade Windows. Is there any good reason to?

I am planning to buy a computer for the library at my kids' elementary school. The use will be cataloging and circulating books using Librarything (web-based; many here are or were users.) Theft is probably not a major concern (the library connects to a room with 20 shiny iMacs), so a laptop would work as well as a desktop. I can spend what I want (although there are always other things I want to do with the library money.)

Thoughts? Would a Chromebook be a good solution? I need durable and reliable and runs the internet, basically.

I know this doesn't apply to you, flea, but I just thought of it -- I have all my music in iTunes on my current laptop, and that's a no-go on a Chromebook, apparently. They helpfully suggest moving to Google Play Music, so something to consider.

I have set private cloud services for my family (wife, kids, and in-laws). My MIL really wanted to have shared calendars so we could all coordinate things, but my wife is a stickler for privacy and wanted something that was under our control, so no Google services.

I ended up setting up OwnCloud which does file sharing, calendars, tasks, contacts, and other stuff. I tried setting it up on our Synology NAS, but while it did work it was slow as hell. Our NAS is pretty low-end so that isn't too much of a surprise. I ended up compromising and running the server on a VM hosted on my home computer, but storing the databases and shared files on NFS shares on the NAS. So now it's sort of like Dropbox with effectively no limit on storage combined with Google-like shared calendars and tasks. (The UI isn't nearly as nice as Google, but it is private.)

Aside from getting the NFS permissions right, the only sort of tricky part was getting SSL set up. I ended up making my own root certificate to create a key and cert for the server and then installed the root cert as a trusted root in everyone's computers so they can use SSL to connect to the server without getting annoying security warnings.

I did upgrade from the Synology that you have, Gud, to the Drobo that Drew has. It's working great for all the boring stuff, but I'm thinking about working on the media server bits today. I mean, yes, I have lots of other work work to do, but it'll all go so much more swimmingly if I have media being served to me, yes?