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I used to joke about people who believe in reptilian aliens and things like that, but after experiencing Windows 8, I don't see how anyone from this earth could have come up with it.? Now that I think about it, I'm not sure that Redmond is physically connected to the rest of earth either, considering the year after year of hassle after hassle, nightmare after nightmare, we have trying to keep a Windows OS functioning properly. When Vista came out, I bought a non-oem version, just to get MS support, but after months of email exchanges with their so-called support, they never did fix (or figure out the cause) of one particular annoyance (how files kept getting corrupted that sfc could not fix.) I go to Microsoft Answers to get their advice, and it appears that their response to my latest issue (with Win8)--to reinstall, or "refresh," Windows--is the best they could do. (A simple registry fix from elsewhere solved the problem.) The greatest annoyance I have with Win8 is the protocol I've developed over the years to keep Windows running is more difficult: just make images regularly, then restore a complete image when something happens. By making regular images, when I figure out the cause of a problem, I can choose an image that predates whatever it was that led to it. But the built-in image tool (WindowsImageBackup) is a nightmare. It warns you that it might overwrite a previous image, but you would think that, if your image is, as in my case, 68 GB or so, and there are 244 GB of empty space available, that it would add a new image (as it did in Vista and Win7). Oh no: it decided to delete the old image anyway--not that having more than one image available to choose from would help, since my experience with WindowsImageBackup is identical to my experience with Ghost--it doesn't necessarily see all the images when there are more than one, and, on occasion, it won't see any, even though you can see them with explorer. Microsoft has stopped dancing with who brung them, so to speak, when it comes to the ease of doing simple things, like getting to safe mode. And what is the deal with system restore? It used to be that it would automatically create restore points before installs, but now--who knows. I have screenshots of 48 different restore points on a Vista machine, but on my brand new Win8 machine, I had gone through a couple of days worth of third-party software installations, then I needed System Restore. Guess what: there were 3 restore points, and it wasn't that it had used up the space, either--the first thing I do is give it tons of space. System restore is the only thing that brought me over from my Amiga to Windows: when it came out with WinMe, I said, finally, someone at Microsoft had an actual thought. Little was I prepared for the all-nighters fixing one issue after another. I thought I was smart, much later, waiting until SP2 came out to get Vista, but, oh no, that was still nightmare city. Win7: I think, by accident, they did something right there, but Win8 is proof that doing something right will get you fired in Redmond. I don't have downgrade rights on my Win8 laptop, and I will most likely buy a Win7 Ultimate to do a clean install, just to get something that human beings can use. Tiles are wonderful for the illiterate among us. Go back to kindergarten--play with your fingers.