Just thought I would update how I'm getting along with what I initially was calling SOS or Satan's Operating System. I've got past my belief that Bielzebub was the lead engineer on Win 8 and now I like it. While it's very true that
everything is different once you get past the short learning curve you pick stuff up easily. Most annoying is the loss of Outlook and Microsoft's Outlook.com program not using POP3 - I'm using Thunderbird now and wonder why I ever used Outlook to begin with. The other gotcha is that what MS calls an upgrade wipes out every last thing that is not a MS product and it even trashed my MS mouse and keyboard aplet as well - you'll be reloaded some software. I also don't care for IE 10 either
and I'm happily still using Chrome. System wise 8 has been fantastic - seems to be resource friendly, zero crashes and it starts up very fast. For $39 it's good deal and it's light years better than Vista though the old fart in me still misses NT