Yes, I'm sitting here typing on Slacko. That's as big a vote as you can get in my book. I have sat here at least a year trying distros and never getting any to where I could actually sit here and use it day to day, always ending up using the windows machine to rescue my failed linux attempts. And I do appreciate the help from yourself and others that enabled me to get this far
Yes, Vista is a pig, but its what came with the machines, and I'm certainly can't pay to upgrade them. The Vista machines are 8 years old now, and not worth putting more than $50 or max $75 into, I'd say. For the big fast drive and SSD combined I spent about $75. Hopefully that will make this machine useful for a few more years.
Booting and running from the SSD, my tweaked Slacko 5.7.0 is booting in 15 seconds from pressing enter on the grub2 menu. Its using 26 mb of memory if I have the pinboard off, or 31 mb with it on, and there are no delays at all that I notice, except when I bring up chromium with 4 windows and 50 tabs spread between them. With all those tabs up I'm using about 40% of CPU and RAM, and everything runs lickety split
Under Windows, the performance doing the same exact screens was utterly abysmal, with a 5 to 10 minute boot time and typical delays once things were up and running of 30 seconds to 5 or 10 minutes to do anything useful, and that was with no viruses or malware, and the exact same wifi connect as Slacko is using.
To switch to grub4dos, the problem around here is finding a windows machine that still runs well that can be experimented with, that doesn't have dire ramifications if it can no longer boot windows. It takes a lot of time and effort to reload a Vista machine, like 3 or 4 days to do it right, or even a few hours to do a terrible, quicky job, that you could do just to see if it would boot.
All the linux partitions except antiX, Manjaro, and Slacko 5.7.0 are non-critical at this point. I'm tired after trying 30 to 50 variations of distros getting something to run well for me. I used up 50 dvd's and 25 cd's trying. It isn't that the others are bad. And I learned quite a lot trying to make them work, but each has had some issue or issues that kept me from wanting to bet the farm on them.
Legacy grub has lost many systems on me, but IIRC, I think its lost the linux ones, not the windows ones. At the time I was a lot less linux savvy, so if it didn't generate the lines needed to boot any particular partition, I was toast and had no chance of getting it booted unless I went and begged for help like here, or got lucky searching and guessing. I noticed that grub2 at least found operating systems and tried to guess what they were and tried to guess how to boot them, where legacy grub missed them entirely.
Grub for DOS pulled a similar stunt last time I tried it. Losing access to a bunch of partitions is no joke. You have no hope of getting them back unless you know what to type in to boot each of them, and that was definitely beyond my linux skill level, then.
Do I "like" grub2? No. My review summary would read "The complexity is atrocious to produce a confusing result. But at least it seems to find the operating systems and takes a reasonable guess how to boot them."
IMO, grub2 is not really designed well. The 40_custom thing getting inserted at the end is no good at all. If anything, those manual overrides should be first on the list, or at least 2nd after the primary OS that is creating the grub.cfg, or inserted where they belong sequentially by partition location, perhaps with the generated code for the same partition off an advanced submenu, but definitely putting 40_custom at the end is a goof!
And I don't like how grub2 mis-identifies almost everything, caused mostly I'd say because the distros couldn't agree on what the menu should say for each OS, and where the update-grub program should find that text. I have now gotten around that on my systems by looking at the os-prober code and cheating by putiing things like "slackware-version" files with what I want displayed on the menu in them.
Maybe I need to find a sacrificial machine, load it with windows and some typical linux flavors, and try grub4dos, and see if I can learn to control it, knowing what I know now.