Windows 8.1 Complicates Simple Tasks

I have spent the past 2 days trying to get Windows 8.1 usable for my wife. I can't believe people actually use Windows as it is such a pain. I am trying to hold off on installing another operating system on my wife's computer as that will be burning the Windows bridge once I start. Besides, I said I would give Windows a fair chance. Unfortunately Windows 8.1 is not very forgiving when you make mistakes and there are enough variations that trying to get help from the usual Internet sites is really confusing.

I bought a laptop that came with Windows 8.1 pre-installed. That becomes important when trying to figure out problems. It is not Windows 8 nor is it Windows Server 2012. I don't have it connected to a specific domain, which to be honest should be true for most laptops. There are a lot of trolls on forums that assume it is a work computer and provide less than useful advice.

My latest mistake with Windows 8.1 started with user accounts. When you go to set up an account you have the option of a local account or an online account. I originally set up my wife's account as a local account because I think it is pointless to have an online one. Microsoft disagrees with me and strongly recommends the opposite. Why? because they can reset your password in the event that you forget it. They can also keep tabs on you and everything you do. My wife followed their recommendation and changed her local account to an online one and even provided them with her birth-date. When Microsoft gets hacked, as all unhackable sites do, then someone can use that information to help steal my wife's identity. Naturally I removed the online account and that was the mistake. I was sure to set up another administrator account before I did it, but as she was the administrator, it changed a bunch of the default settings. Instead of having a nice piano image when the computer boots, it had a really ugly yellow-rainbowish image that causes epileptic seizures in cats. That ugly image needed to be changed and that was my problem.

Surely I couldn't be the only person who wanted to change the pre-login screen and so I searched the Internet. I checked a number of Microsoft forum pages but they were useless and so I won't even bother to link them. I found one page that shed some light on the issue as well as a number of related issues with Microsoft's latest operating system. If you bother to go through the postings you can see my frustration. In an effort to save you from a lot of reading the string of posts goes something like this:

• I want to change the pre-login screen image
• Here is how to change the lock-screen image
• That is not what I asked
• Here is a link to instructions from Microsoft
• That just tells me how to change the lock-screen image and is not what I asked
• You are a moron, changing the lock-screen image changes the pre-login screen image
• No I'm not a moron, changing the lock-screen image works only if you have one account for your PC, I have multiple and want to know how to change the pre-login screen image.
• Here is a link to instructions from Microsoft on how to do it in Windows Server 2012.
• I'm not running Windows Server 2012, I am running Windows 8.1 on a PERSONAL computer.

The posts go on for quite some time until finally someone actually gives a very convoluted way to do what the original poster asked. Coincidently that was what I was looking for. Other users having the same issue come up with numerous short cuts.

I read through the solutions and found one that seemed reasonable. In the process, I learned that there are a number of hidden directories (e.g. C:\ProgramData) that you can't get to unless you explicitly type it into the File Explorer. Even then there are a number of difficulties as administrators don't have permission to see who owns certain files. You have to change your administrator user to be the owner of files.

I used to belong to the group of people in the world that believed Microsoft knew how to write software. That is no longer the case as I think they over complicate even the simplest of tasks.