OK, so, dad's getting to grips with Windows 8, though there's lots about it that's incredibly aggravating.

One of the things is this: they've discontinued Outlook because they want to force you to do all your email via their cloud (also called Outlook).

Well, dad's got thousands of emails backed up on an external drive, but ... how are you supposed to open them??????

He ended up downloading a program which will open emails and attachments, which works really well, but when the trial period ran out he needed it (and liked it) enough to pay for it (and it wasn't cheap!!!)

I wish I'd asked on here before, because I bet someone's going to tell me there's a simpler solution, or even that you can in fact download Outlook from somewhere and use it on Windows 8?

The old Outlook saves it's contents to .OST and .PST files. AFAIK the Win7 mail app which I understand is not dissimilar to the Win8 one can import both these files providing of course you saved them.

Win8 is the new Vista, Windows2000, Win ME. It's the latest bad Windows version and best avoided if you can. I'll be getting a new PC in October and that will be installed with Win7 64bit because I'm not touching 8.

Win9 is supposed to be out before year end because Win8 has proved a disaster as it's more tablet orientated and useless for desktops. Win9 is supposed to bring back the bits of Win7 that are required for desktops.
Can you imagine business users trying to spend all day with their arms in mid air trying to touchscreen their way around

At the moment business will not touch Win8 or Office 2013. Office 2013 has big black and white touch buttons which reduces the 'in focus' options quite considerably and means most of the options are in sub menus which is a big time waster. Gone is colour because black and white shows up better on tablets.

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Lets be careful out there !

It's madness.

It is

If you want to 'upgrade' to Win7 I think Novatech are still selling it.

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Lets be careful out there !

I've got W7 on my laptop. Preferred XP.

TBH I think so do I, you had proper control over it. Windows developed from the early blocky job to it's peak in XP. W7 and W8 are M$ trying to think of new ideas and it's now over developed.

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Lets be careful out there !

Totally agree. And they've made Word much more complicated to use, I'm also pretty sure it's talking to a server somewhere all the time. On the plus side it's got lots of powerful new artistic features if you've got time to mess about.