I am typing this on my new Windows 8.1 tower computer, a custom box I configured and bought from NCIX in Burnaby, BC.

As mentioned in previous posts, my Windows 7 tower suffered a bad bout of malware awhile back that took several anti-virus programs and some manual tweaking to clean up. It was starting to show its age, anyway, and some tasks like video editing were very slow with its 6GB of RAM and a 512K video card.

The new machine has 16GB of RAM and a 2GB video card, along with an 8-core 3.5GHz processor, so that should make an appreciable difference.

I haven’t found Windows 8.1 to be as much of an interface challenge as I had feared. I’d read horror stories about folks complaining about the Windows 8 touch/tile interface, but 8.1 has made it easier to go back to an interface relatively familiar to users of Windows 7 and previous versions.

I’ve already got Office 365 installed, and a few favorite apps that I use daily, such as ClipMate, Evernote, and IrfanView.

I have yet to get many programs installed such as the Adobe Suite, etc. I’ll chip away at it bit by bit over the next few days, while keeping the old box running side by side on the network. I also need to transfer all my files and photos, but I’ve got all those synced to a NAS (network attached storage) unit on my network anyway.