I just got my wife, The Bear, a new laptop. 64bit Dual Core, 4gigs memory and a 750 gig hard drive (but...strangely...no DVD reader/writer). And it's a little hummer. $229 semolians! Pretty soon they'll be payin us to just take em. Only thing, it's got Windows 8 on it and me no understand or likey. But I'm learning. I finally got it all setup and got all the crapware off it. But it was no "cakewalk" (see what I did there?). My biggest problem is I can't figure how to easily "get back to where I once belonged". Or find commonplace files or folders or controls. But, of course, I'm a dimbulb. Or am I??

If you just bought it perhaps there's a free 8.1 upgrade. I hear it's a little more familiar interface.

Ya..it's got that. And you can actually load a "classic" desktop view. But getting around is h e double hockey sticks.

I've learned never to get an even numbered Window's OS.  XP and 7 are good, Vista and 8 not so much...

http://www.classicshell.net/
 
You're welcome.

Thanks drew, ol pal. Will download and try tomorrow a.m.

Here ya go ol pal.........
 

 
 
 
Also, ask your ol pal google how to make yourself an off button (tile) for start screen, turn off the charms bar and all will be well.

yorolpal
.... My biggest problem is I can't figure how to easily "get back to where I once belonged". Or find commonplace files or folders or controls. But, of course, I'm a dimbulb. Or am I??

Get an utility called "Classic Shell", and you can have the front look like your previous one.
 
It's free, too!
 
And yes, not having a choice of desktops, is really stupid and even I didn't like it.

Mucho helpful Paulo, ol pal!

+1 for classic shell. However there are some potential advantages with the Win 8 start screen such as building groups of programs, my main beef is the tiles are big and ugly. I wish there was an option to reduce them to icon size.
 
There is a lot of crap "apps" bundled with it as opposed to "programs" and once you get rid of them things improve. There too much stuff pulling things off the internet all the time. I never understood why you need a special "app" for, say, Facebook when it works perfectly well in your favourite web browser.
 
Other nastys are things like the PDF reader app, install Acrobat or Foxit or whatever and associate PDFs with that.
 
The OS itself is very good indeed.