Fortunately my 26 year old daughter came in and scrolled to the top of the screen and there it was...yeah, right, totally freakin' obvious MS, this Metro interface is going.

I have to agree about 8.1, but there is an option to use the "Classic Windows" interface.

I haven't used a PC for a few years but recently needed to get a windows machine for a project and I couldn't believe what an awful thing 8.1 was. Fortunately one of our illustrious Admins, Brett Tabke helped me out with a link to this article that helped me get through the nightmare in a few hours: [arstechnica.com...]

I had spent several hours before I asked, I thought I knew my way around Windows.

The Metro Start page on Windows 8 really never made much sense to me on laptops or desktops. You can easily work around the Metro tiles, and with 8.1 you can make it so that you never see that. Now you have the option to start out in your familiar old desktop environment instead of landing on the Start screen when the computer boots up.

From the Windows 8.1 desktop, right-click on the taskbar and choose Properties. Go to the Navigation tab. In the “Start screen” options click the checkbox next to “When I sign in or close all apps on a screen, go to the desktop instead of Start.”

Also chose "Show the Apps view automatically when I go to Start". That hides the Start page a bit and shows you your apps/programs.

If you want to disable the “charms bar” you can turn it off in the “Corner navigation” area. Once you have made your changes to the Taskbar and Navigation Properties box. Apply the changes and you're good to go.

The next time you start the computer and log in you should start off in the desktop mode.

These small changes make Windows 8 usable for most. I never use that tiled monstrosity of a Start menu. I don't use any apps there either. Without that I have generally had a good experience with Windows 8.

Just wait until Windows 10 if you want the old Start menu back.

I installed a free utility named Classic Shell within minutes of seeing Windows 8.

There are several other free programs available to keep mothers happy.

...

Thanks for the responses, I thought I was losing it!

I persevered and got the thing running nice and sweet and now it can click back and forth between classic and 8.1 easily. I gave the lady a 10 minute destruction course and told her to play with it until she got stuck. I went back to see her this morning and she loves it and is playing around with 8.1 to see what it does but always has that quick escape back to classic should the need arise.

Mates, having long had a requirement for a useful tool when I'm away from home, I finally settled on a very, very cheap Lenovo B50-30 Laptop/Notebook. I purchased it last week [for my 73rd birthday]. I discarded tablets etc as totally impractical.

Cheap as in $A299 - about $US 230

Win 8.1 64 bit with Bing embedded along with Lenovo Bloatware, and all the other suspects except Adobe Acrobat.

Simply took me a few short hours to clean it up, customise it to my tastes, install Firefox, Thunderbird, other selected programs of my choice. Dump Bing, bloatware...

Almost a replica of my Custom Desktop PC.

Yesterday I got around to adding Classic Shell to finally round it off.

Guess who is a very pleased, and a very smug little chappie? It does every thing I want - that is what matters.

My advice to anybody: If you don't like Win 8.1 right out of the box? Configure it to your own tastes.

[ADDED] Would you believe Mr. Microsoft just sent me an email - "Meet the new Windows".

Wow! Another update on Windows 10? Nope, unbelievably...

Welcome to the getting started series

Each email in this series will help you get familiar with the new features, apps and settings in Windows 8.1.

In this first email, we’ll go over the basics.

Ya gotta be kidding? My long time Microsoft account didn't already tell them...

I found that a lot of issues on my win 7 desktop and win 8.1 laptop were caused by memory leaks from my browser along with shockwave issues.

I use chrome but I've seen memory leaks with other browsers as well The approach I took was

1. I forget where it was , but there was a setting to make it so that flash didn't autoload If I want to see the content I 'click to play'
2. There is an extension for chrome that will suspend tabs after a certain point. That seems to work well.
3. I keep an eye on the task manager. Take a look at free memory. When that runs out, things get slow. I sort the processes by memory and kill any high usage/low pri processes.


Agan, I've found that in my case, most performance issues were related to poorly designed websites stealing available memory.

chris