It's been 3 years since W10 came out. I recently tested W10 in a VM to see how it's matured. It was unusably slow. Things would take seconds to appear, sometimes dozens of seconds.

Then I tried Windows 7, and I could not believe the difference. We're talking 5-10x faster. Everything just responds instantly. Too bad they're ending support in a year.

Are you using an SSD? Been using W10 for years across multiple hardware. All with SSD drives though. Never had issues with responsiveness.

People keep bringing this up, but I really don't think I, or anybody, should need an SSD in order to have a fast-acting computer. Spinning rust, RAM, and CPU clocks are faster now than twenty years ago, CPUs have vastly more cache, we have more CPUs, and our compilers and prefetch algorithms are smarter than ever. Why, then, are the same basic tasks not any faster, and sometimes slower? Why is the answer to use even faster technology?

I hear you, but why can't humans go farther from the Earth than they did in the 1970s?

Because for better or worse that's not what technology has been designing for.

Many programs nowadays are designed for the tradeoffs of SSDs rather than spinning media.

I agree but what I have noticed from doing some troubleshooting is that applications now-a-days (or rather always) use up more hardware as time goes by. For example, I verified with perfmon that my IDE accessed over 50,000 files when i clicked on 'Open' and the directory tree popped up. It accessed every file in my Documents and other standard folders. Browsers also use up a lot of disk IO. Just by getting an SSD you speed up your web browsing.

Try to use Android Studio, you will surely miss not having a SSD around. :(

If your OS is running totally in virtual memory instead of mostly RAM I see a problem.