I find Win 8 and Win 8.1 so distasteful that I have told my household we will not have it in our house. You heard me right. No Win 8/Win 8.1 in the house. I've been more of a Mac user for the last 5 years or so than a PC user when it comes to home life. I have an iPad, an iPHone and a Macbook Pro. My daughter currently uses my hand-me-down iPad Gen 1 to do what she needs to. My husband and I do still have PC's but both are Windows 7. I'll be damned if I buy another PC to do my job in the future. Will continue to factory restore my Win 7 as long as the hardware holds out. Same for my husband. Once either one of them dies we will find the replacement software so things work on Linux or on Mac. Period.
You say, "Well that is all well and good but what about the family outside the current household? What about the grandparents etc?" Well I have to begrudgingly say that I am having to face this now. *sigh*. My father's machine took a deep 6 and he bought a new machine. *sigh* Then he came to me saying "What is this and how do I use it?" To which I responded, "I warned you." I am now having to make his machine more familiar to him. I spent about 3 hours last night uninstalling stuff and putting his stuff on. To the credit of Best Buy where he had taken his old machine, they put all his data onto the new machine and I didn't have to do nearly as much as I thought I would have to. So the first thing I did was to return the good ol' start menu back where it belongs. If you don't know about Classic Shell ( http://www.classicshell.net/), you need to look into this. It literally brings back your Start Menu the way you remember it:
You can then move forward with your life pretty easily from there. The Shell in the lower left corner can be changed to show the image with "Start" next to it to make it more obvious. I did this for my Dad. Now with Win 8.1 not yet out to the general public, I'll have to teach Dad to get to the desktop but I feel confident he can get that far for now.
I did find through a co-worker an additional article from ZDNet that I am going to work on tonight to make things a little bit better, however. The article focus' more so on Win 8.1 it the new tweaks Microsoft gave in to in order to make things more palatable. But some still can be utilized with Win 8.0. The only thing it doesn't cover is utilizing Classic Shell which is why I am posting here.
So if you're like me and you refuse to allow the beast in your home but it's swarming nearby, perhaps these recommendations will make look a bit more like an old friend than a rabid dog.
