Plenty of good advice there too, but one thing I would totally disagree with mstreurman on is windows 10, never install that piece of crap on any of your systems!! Unless you want microshit to know everything you're doing(and eventually the whole world when their servers will inevitably get hacked) and you want them to install software on your pc without your knowledge, etc, etc, etc. And despite what some people will tell you no, you can't opt out of all that, even if you try to disable some of it they will renable it without your knowledge....
In my opinion a tiny boost in performance is not worth losing whatever privacy we have left. But hey, your choice.
In my opinion a tiny boost in performance is not worth losing whatever privacy we have left. But hey, your choice.