Good points
I have a suggestion for your printers. Try the Vista or even the XP drivers. I have an old HP printer and scanner (only about 4-5 years old, so not THAT old). Win 7 doesn't like either one. I downloaded the Vista drivers and unzipped them. Then I used the Update Driver feature and pointed it to the unzipped driver location. It worked. You tend to just get basic functionality that way, but at least it works and that's all I need. I've had XP drivers work for other things. Don't know if this will work for Win 8 as I'm not using it (yet).