donnas ... Virus program you might want to make sure the program itself is upgraded to latest version. And then keep the virus definitions updated daily.. should be ok for a while.. how long of a while would be strictly a wild guess. edit; Here is a list of anti-virus programs and their estimated end of life dates with xp .. at MajorGeeks site Personally if I had an XP computer, I don't think I would feel comfortable with online banking or bill paying or anything that might affect monies in the future. hald ... you can manually download and install 8.1-update1. Might save you from downloading it twice,,, once on each computer. See the link below. You need to make sure you have KB2919442 installed first.. before installing the about 700mb KB2919355, after that's installed run windows update again and it will offer about a 200mb custom version of the 355 to finish it off with all the other kb's built in it. Here is a link that might be useful: Answers.Microsoft.com forum page with links This post was edited by mikie on Sat, Apr 12, 14 at 7:41

From my experience with W 7 & 8...I would google Classic Shell and see if it is compatible with W 8.1, if it is I would go with it. I think every computer I have had except ME has been faster than the last one. Classic Shell is a great software that converts the W8's into a computer more like the version we are use to. My Acer laptop is very fast and the monitor part moves to comfortable positions for your vision, especially if you have mid range vision. It converts from a laptop to a tablet, a very large tablet.

I'm now leaning more towards doing the transfers through external hard drive (gulp) - however, I'm confused on how to hook up the new computer with the old computer still hooked up. Would I just plug it in, and then connect it to our wireless home network? It seems the (old) monitor has only one hook-up spot which the old computer is plugged into. Should I wait for the new monitor to arrive (which is supposed to be about a month from now according to the estimated delivery date)? Or do I need the new computer hooked into a monitor just for transferring data? Now I'm thinking maybe I just need the new computer plugged into the monitor, and the XP computer not plugged in - lol - I'm confused. Maybe I should wait until everything arrives.

Any new printer from a mainstream manufacturer will have Win8 drivers available and fully compatible. I've no direct experience trying to find drivers for Win8, but of course it's the printer manufacturer that produces it and most typically don't bother to do updates for vintage or older models long past being sold. With previous Windows version changes, old version drivers sometimes worked, but maybe not in this case since Win 8 is so different from 7. Have you tried to use a Win 7 driver?