Nice thanks i have both a touch enabled device (a surface rt i was given) and a laptop that came with windows 8
Windows 8/8.1 works well if you have a touch screen but can be a major pain if you do not have a touch screen
being able to get back to more mouse based work will help with standard computers i might even put off the downgrade i had been thinking of doing on my lt

i've been using pokki start button replacement. it made up for the missing button very well in 8.0, and it integrates perfectly with 8.1 sitting next to the returned start button. the only advantage the returned start button has given me is the very nice list available on a right click. other things that 8.1 fixed are more important to me than a start button. on startup the machine no longer crawls for more than an hour as it reads the name of every file to create a file name search list. it's homegroup network is more responsive, and the feature that allows and blocks startup program is more reliable too.

Is there still a "Personalization" control panel with "Windows Classic" as an option?

Or you could upgrade to Linux mint....

I have been using Win8 since March and 8.1. since it came out as a full release. I guess that I must have gotten a leg up by using my touch-enabled device and a second non-touch monitor with a mouse. I have no clue how people ever had problems with it. I find it to be effortless. While it is nice to see people developing apps to do things that are perceived to be useful by people updating from ancient Windows, I still don't really see the point of a lot of them. I switch between desktop and metro all the time for a bunch of reasons, mouse, touch, stylus, it makes no difference that I can see to my productivity other than I can choose the best tool for a particular job.

No applications in the Windows Store is available. The word 'Unable to connect to the server ' always always appears on my screen. Windows Store is useless, isn't it?

@Jack Wong not that I use any of the apps really in the windows store but I never had any problems. I am downloading the update through the store right now. Your firewall might be blocking the connection for some reason?

Is it possible for you to give directions on how to get the new start button? You just tell us it is available, but no direction Where to find it. Just a download for Classic Shell? What do I do after that to get the start button?

@Jack Wong I had an issue with the Surface RT on 8.0 that the store would not connect when I moved from Home to work wifi it was telling me that the Wifi was connected but the store could not connect at first I was rebooting to fix but I found that if I put it in airplane mode and then back out again it would work
please note that I have not had the issue after the 8.1 update

If it doesn't boot to a command line it is not a computer.