The penguin, it calls! In all seriousness, I DO have a Windows 7 tower now, if nothing else because that's what came with it - but I'll have to relearn crap as I go because I've been 100% Linux for the better part of a decade now on my own PCs (though if I can find the settings list to change 7 to function similar to Unity like what I had at my old job, that'd make things a LOT smoother).
That being said, the little bit I've used 10 seems like a slightly glazed over 7/8 hybrid with a fancy unsupported but relatively fast browser, so a lot like KDE 4 when it first came out (as opposed to now...KDE 4 and 5 I dare say are the most newbie friendly DEs on ANY operating system).
And the registry hack is likely the most robust method for keeping the updater at bay (that and shutting off the automatic updates, as that can also cause a svchost.exe process to run nontop and annihilate processor resources).