It’s early to tell, and I’m still not quite finished transferring files from my old ‘puter via flash drive. But, so far, I think Windows 8.1 is a pain in the rear. Pity I had to leave XP. But it was necessary and I figured I might as well go all the way.
Like all big OS products, including “virtuous” Apple, 8.1 has all these arcane little programs running that it dares you to figure out how to alter or get rid of.
Such as the “tiles” on the “start” page, before the start, actually, and/or desktop pages. It’s cute, but it’s wired to stuff I don’t want, like Bing search and Bing news, i.e. Al Reuters, et al.
Still working on switching the tiles to Google and FoxNews. If I can’t, it’s bye-bye tiles. Finally got the email working. Thunderbird. 8.1 has an aversion to POP servers, though. Wants you to go on the cloud. Security, I suppose.
UPDATE: A week in and it’s still hassling me. Even Dell dropped the ball. I had to Google the new computer to figure out how to open the DVD drive. Geez Louise.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
You’re still ahead of me. I had heard some disgruntled news about Windows 8 (I didn’t like all the tiles, but was assured that I can switch to a ‘standard’ option), but was told that 8.1 corrected the main concerns. With your info, maybe not so much.
I have Windows 7 but I’m not into computers.. All I know is what I’ve tripped over. But my computer is over 4 years old and I’m experiencing some problems (slow, gets stuck, some file doesn’t download so I can’t get to my iTunes). I’ll have to find a software geek or buy a new one.
So far as I can tell, the only “improvement” of the tiles is that you can now change their colors. Whooeee. I kind of like them, getting used to them, I suppose, but I still want to configure them my way and so far I can’t figure out how.
Yeah. My current desktop has at least another year or so in it, so I hope to hold out for now. Good luck anyway.