A lot of my workaday programs - audacity, firefox, chrome, opera (for website proofing), various text editor, file manager, recovery, video & audio file conversion etc are "portable versions" on a second drive. My Lenovo came with an SSD and it was fast. It means in the event I migrate to Win 10 (shudder) - much of the familiar is available and visually the same, and hopefully work the same! And all of those apps are also on a 32 Gb stick. Curiously with all my photos & 40 hours (edited) audio plus raw audio of same plus numerous video files (unedited yet) of canal restoration only eat up 2/3 of the 1Tb drive.


All those Micro$oft updates have certainly slowed my machine down, but I do boot up older machines and the GF's which in the case of the XP machine is not that slow to start.

I always remember 18 years ago we had a set-up at work which was controlled by a PC running Win 3.0 - when the service guy came we asked why they still ran Win 3 and he said watch this - and switched on. By the time we registered what to watch it had booted. They installed Win 3 on the latest hardware, and it flew. A lesson learned there and then. Run old OS on newest hardware if you want speed. SSDs are an example of that.