Since I retired, I use Linux almost exclusively, but since I get bugged by friends/family/neighbors to fix their Windows booboos, I figured it was time to see for myself what abortion MS had wrought with Windows 8/8.1. Since I'd done some work for a neighbor who was short on cash, but had a spare boxed copy of Win8.1, I took the copy of Windows, kind of wondering what I'd ever do with it.. Decided to take a spare drive and install it on my Dell laptop. The install went fine, and, sure enough, this sure the hell doesn't look like XP (the last MS OS I *really* dealt with).. Installed a bunch of stuff with Ninite, then came the 100+ updates, and a reboot.. After the reboot, and login to the desktop, first thing out of the machine was kaboom, a nice lite blue screen telling me there was a problem and the machine had stopped.. A "VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE" in part of the nvidia driver that apparently had been applied in the mass of updates.. A bit of googly-ness showed that this was a common thing with the crap video drivers that Windows update carries.. So a visit to safe mode (no longer as easy to get to as XP's safe mode was) and an install of the latest driver from Nvidia itself.. Now the machine works nicely, with classicshell and some other tweaks that "fix" the idiocy that is Windows 8/8.1... But as for me, after this little trip into MS-land, I'm back to Linux....