I doubt it will be any more stable the moment they start charging for it. It's "free" because they need to consolidate their PC Operating System base into a single platform. I'm sure at some point we will be paying for "updates" or some such thing. Just like Office 365 is basically Office as a service, I suspect Windows 10 will eventually follow some similar route.

Is there a particular one that you recommend?

Subscription eh PR?
That was one of the possible MS endgames mentioned months ago at some tech forum.
For whatever reason I think (or maybe hope) that the outcry would be so large and dramatic that something about the MS monopoly will finally be done. If there was a FUNCTIONAL alternative I would drop them like a live grenade.
As for me I would gladly pay top dollar for a viable Windows alternative just to go down screaming.

EDIT: Sorry I was so busy on my soapbox I forgot to answer sir!
I use DWS (Destroy Windows Spying) which is an easy one-click solution with plenty of options. Freeware at about 450kb in size.

Thanks Duke.

Here's another one that works well:

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

RedToo.

I don't pay for anything and haven't since I started using BG's merry men stuff with Dos 1. And as for M$ 'support' you can forget it.

Thank you, RedToo.

Well, I upgraded to Win 10 today and then had to revert to Win 7. The Windows installation seemed to work fine but Nvidia wasn't happy. I couldn't get Nvidia's control panel to open so I tried to update the drivers. Every attempt failed - using GeForce Experience, going directly to Nvidia's website, using Driver Easy, installing express or clean - they all failed.

I'm happy with Win 7 anyway so I'll just wait until I start over with a new unit.

Interesting.
All other MS stuff aside the installation of W10 for me was quite painless and everything (programs and hardware) worked fine out the box.
I have a GTX 970 4GB card and multiple drivers worked great. What kind of card do you have?

980Ti

New card then. Don't get it...

@Hellshade

Agreed. It will become a revenue stream for them just like we pay for cable TV only to be subject to 5 minute long commercial breaks and perhaps 35-40minutes per hour of actual programming...

And it's "free" because most people won't turn off the tracking, etc, and they'll have access to a treasure trove of data to sell.

But I'm prepping to do it, because with work, and stuff it's inevitable. Like Duke said, if there was any other way... But anyway, I bought a 960 GB SanDisk Ultra II today and am trying to figure out how to go about it. My 240 GB SSD was so small that I put all my user accounts (app data and all) on my spinning drive, I'm hoping I don't get headaches from that. It was tough, it was 4-1/2 years ago, and I forget how I did it!

The weirdness continues..........

I reverted to Win 7 and everything seems to be normal. A new Nvidia driver came out today so I used GeForce Experience to download it. This time I chose custom installation and entered a check mark for "clean installation" . It did install the new driver but it didn't do a clean installation. None of my settings were changed and the control panel still shows the CFS3 profile.

Weird, but at least its not a problem (since I'm back on Win 7).