Upgrading to Windows 8.1 (Part 3).

Upgrading Windows 8.1 pro Preview to the final released Windows 8.1 pro. (Part 3).

Right, off to installing some actually useful software...

Belarc Advisor, Firefox, the Gimp, LibreOffice, TightVNC.

Some of these installs don't put an icon on the desktop. You can find and run them with search, if you can remember what they're called, or how it's spelled.

In their arrogance, MS have made it more difficult to make a shortcut.

To start with:-

Click file explorer icon on the task bar.

Click view.

Tick “file name extension”.

Close.

For the Gimp:-

Right click where you want the shortcut to go on the desktop.

Select new, shortcut, and click browse.

Drill down through: This PC, Local Disk(C:), Program files, Gimp2, bin

and highlight gimp-2.8.exe

click ok, next, finish, and there it is.

Other programs will be similar, but if they turn out to be 32 bit versions, they'll be in “Program Files (x86)”

Some may not use the bin folder, and some are in a folder with the name of the software house instead of the actual program.

As I have the media pack, I thought I'd like to watch a DVD. It wants to set up media player. Eventually, after much disk rattling, Express or Custom.

I've met this sort of question before! Custom!

Did I want to join some sort of customer experience program? No thanks.

Do I want it to download cover art? I suppose, yes.

Then some display and sound setup questions, and it say's we're done.

Now there's a weird screen with TV, Sports and whatnot. What?

The scroll wheel on the mouse scrolls up and down even more strange options.

This looks like some sort of online streaming program. All I want to do is play my DVD!

The Sports section appears to be very American.

Eventually, hidden in the Movies section, I see a very faint button marked Play DVD.

That must be it! Yes. Success at last, but what a tedious performance to get here.

Now to get a driver for my printer. I put the printer model into the Epson support site, but for some reason, it mis-identifies the OS as Linux. Doh! Scroll down and select Windows 8.x 64 bit.

Goody, there's a driver. There's various licence and security boxes to click through, and a restart.

When I select “Update and restart” there are 6 Windows updates already! Windows 8.1 has been out less than a week! Still, it sees the printer over the wifi.

Finally, I can run Belarc Advisor and print the results.