I took a 6 hour class at our adult school and felt I now knew how to use Windows 8 but, of course, when I got home it didn't work. Our instructor said not to download 8.1 - that it wasn't much better and we would lose a lot of things. Costco tech told me the same thing. I guess you have to sign up all over again and I have already installed Office 2013 so I sure don't want to lose that. I had Vista before and never had any problems with it. I wish I had never gotten it.