I knew I couldn’t hold out for long. Having some time available this evening, I went ahead and updated the laptop to Windows 8.1. Up to now I have spent as little time as possible in the Metro/Modern UI. Will see if 8.1 improves my experience any. The jury is out. Really annoying big black and orange boxes commanding me to use gestures even though I do not have a touchscreen, obscuring large swaths of the screen. I think I was able to banish them, at least for the moment. Several important browser add-ons show as incompatible with IE 11, especially Evernote. Looks like it’s back to Firefox for me. Also a Citrix file called pnamain.exe does not seem to like 8.1. Getting on to HPM and Epic from Citrix may be a challenge.
Desktop will have to wait. It is almost five years old and came from Dell with Vista on it. It is definitely time to do a clean install. In any event, I can’t get to the Windows Store since a month or two back when I got a bad infection with Sirefef. I was fortunately able to clean the Trojan off the machine, but ever since then, the Store and all of its apps fail to communicate through Windows Firewall. I have not been able to figure out how to fix that. No other way, it seems, to download Windows 8.1. (Not to mention the Weather app being frozen in time….)
Critical Condition 
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