Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Windows 8,1

I had to do it.  Antique Laptop died for good.  Screen went dark and stayed dark.  So, Ho, a new  laptop.  HP Pavilion cursed with Windows 8.1   Due to a 2 Ghz Intel Mode whatever CPU 64 bit, it is nearly as fast as XP.  Not quite, but nearly.  Managed to get onto the wireless router and download Firefox.  Upon which I am posting this. 
   Step 2 was to establish an account for me.  The XP "Settings" and "Account Manager" was hidden, along with the "run" block on the start menu,  for that matter, they hid the start menu  Now you just type "user"  on the black screen.  Shades of DOS.  And now the cheese gets binding.  8.1 wants an email address to use as your account name.  I don't want to do that.  I do my email from Trusty Desktop, and I don't want tricky laptop downloading my email and loosing it.  So, it appears to run somehow without an account. 
   It also has a keyboard hiccup.  Every so often it stops typing and flips up the time and date.  Or jumps the cursor at random.   PITA.  There is probably something to fix that in software, but I don't have clue.   Might be the touch pad is active, and I don't know how to shut it off. 
   Anyhow, a giant leap backward for computerkind. 

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