Still getting used to Windows 8.1....

I had to wait most of the day for the clouds to clear away, so that I could see the hills without clouds blocking the view, and here's what they look like today.
It's definitely winter up there now. Fortunately, the grass is still green down here in the lowlands, but there's a chill in the air for sure.

Since installing the free upgrade to Windows 8.1, I've been getting a constant 'cycling' or peaking every few seconds by both cores of the Processor (as above) and I can't figure out why. I've run scans by the installed antivirus (Avast and Malwarebytes) and nothing was found. So today, I tried one of the several on-line scanners available, this one from ESET....

...and it found nothing either, so I'm no closer to solving the mystery of why the Processor is loading up and unloading again within seconds, and constantly. I'm no expert, but let's face it - this can't be doing the Processor any good, and I'd love to make it stop that, if only I could figure out how. Or I should say, if only I could figure out what's causing it, so I could trash whatever that is.

This is one of the perils of installing new stuff - there's always that doubt about whether or not it's going to make things better or worse. Right now, I'm leaning towards throwing out Windows 8.1, and re-installing Windows 8. I mention that not just to express my feelings, but also as an opportunity to mention that it's a lot more of a problem reverting to a previous system with Windows 8.1 than it was before, with other versions of Windows, because for most of us, it means we have to start from scratch, and do a clean re-install of the previous (Win-8) system, and then have to re-install all our programs and files, and that's a hell of a lot of bother. And I could be wrong, but I suspect Microsoft may have made it that way purposely so that we'd be more tempted to say, "Aw, the hell with it, I'll keep this abortion on here, because I can't be bothered wasting another couple of days getting everything restored to where it was before I got stupid and put this mess on here." That's my suspicion, but I of course can't prove it.

If I sound less than thrilled after only a couple of days on Windows 8.1, you'd be correct in making that assumption. I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about Windows 8 either, because obviously it offers very little improvement over Windows 7 to those of us using desktops without touch-enabled monitors (and there's still more of us than there are of 'them' - those thumb-typers). But I got used to it, and found ways of tweaking it with third-party programs that add nice features to it. Now, along comes Windows 8.1, which is really a glorified Service Pack by another name, and it plays around with the shapes and sizes of its Apps tiles, and adds cloud storage capability, in case you trust your personal files to some silver-tongued but total stranger, and some other features are equally mixed blessings, and it isn't even easy to get rid of it.

Why am I bitching about that? Because I resent the way Microsoft assumes that whatever is good for it should also be really terrific for everyone else. In fact and in truth, that's just not so. And as Will Rogers once said, "It's not the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we do know that ain't so."