+1 I've done this on laptops before to save the sanity of someone using them.

On every Lenovo ThinkPad I get, the very first thing I do is disable the touchpad.

Control Panel | Mouse | UltraNav

Thanks, all of you who recommended disabling the touchpad.

I located device manager and disabled the touchpad. For good measure, I also slowed down the rate of the mouse.

Knock on wood--probably need a day or two to be sure--but so far I have had no more font changes or inexplicable scrolling. Or browser inexplicably cutting off, for that matter.

I appreciate the help. It appears to have solved the problem. Again, knock on wood, but it's looking good. ^

It's also good to know that the difficulty is not with Windows 8, as I had assumed.

UPDATE: SPOKE TOO SOON. This next a.m. the font size again changed, on its own, despite disabling the touchpad and slowing down the mouse. I am thinking that I probably got what I paid for on this laptop, and I am still happy with the purchase and can live with the difficulties, which I am now guessing might be undiagnosable and unsolvable. Anyhow, for the purposes of this thread, at least I have discovered that it is not a Windows 8 problem.

Well I can't think what else it could be, doubtful it would be a key combination and it sounds very frustrating for you. I once lost hours of work when I managed to hit my touchpad twice by accident and that managed to shut down the programme I was working on without saving anything. I was on a train and the movement of the train had jolted my hand onto the pad, the resultant closure caused me to say "Fudge" rather loudly. After figuring out it was that that had caused it, I disabled it and then when back home I found a piece of plastic which I cut to the same size and put that over the top of it, just in case.

So, after three weeks and 9 different customer service reps, Microsoft has decided that my current computer is not compatible to run Windows 8. I don't want to get into yesterday's 12-hour saga other than to say that at least the last person I spoke to at the Microsoft Store did not hassle me about returning everything and getting a refund. Now I just have to be diligent about getting it all back to them this week.

Best regards,

William R. Sanders
Social Media Specialist
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide

[email protected]

This sort of dovetails with my experiences of getting 8 to work on an old (or should that be ancient) machine. However I decided that rather than me doing the donkey work with trying to get the ancient Sony Vaio VGC-V3M XP machine belonging to a family member to work with 8, I would have the folks at our local PCWorld shop do it. Okay so it was costing me �60 for them to do it but I didn't care as it meant I wasn't looking for drivers etc. So I am then told a few days later that they can't do it - machine too old and will have to refund me all the charges. So I asked about adding memory and the bloke says Fuhgeddaboudit just buy a new one.

Apparently, in my case, it was the processor. At no time during the trial run process that you can go through before actually purchasing was the processor identified as a problem. There were things that were listed as not being compatible, but I was prepared to forego those and use alternatives.

Hopefully, Microsoft continues to support XP for a while longer. I don't have any intention of buying a new computer anytime soon.

Best regards,

William R. Sanders
Social Media Specialist
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide

[email protected]

You should be okay for at least a year, more than 40% of Windows machines are using XP so MS need to migrate these users to win7 or 8 before realistically being able to do that, despite any published date.

My understanding is that XP won't be supported beyond 2014. So, I went ahead and update all of my old PCs to Windows 7. I did this before 8 was released. I was surprised at the huge improvement in performance over XP. Two of the computers were 6 and 7 year old laptops. The third was a 6 year old desktop. If XP support isn't extended then that might be a good option for you to consider.

MS have been making a huge push to get people off XP so that they can stop supporting it - hence the naming of a date (which they have pushed back already I think). I read somewhere that they are very happy for people to migrate to Win 7 if they don't fancy 8 but just want them off XP.

I'm glad they did because the performance boost on these old PCs was great!

So I was able to snag a $14.95 upgrade to Win8 Pro and figured, "why not?"

I've got an ASUS netbook sitting around with Win7 on it, doing nothing, and the reports of Win8 speeding up older PCs inspired me to give it a try. It's now 24 hours later and I'll let you know if I ever get this #$%^&* thing installed.

I installed it to a DVD per Microsoft's instructions and tried 4 times to install it, with the installation failing each time. I tried all of Microsoft's suggestions, none of which worked. Then I tried booting from the DVD and installing clean from that. That failed. And, of course, now there is no operating system at all on my ASUS. I re-installed Win7, and used the "install Win8 from download" link in the email from Microsoft with my product key. It's installing at this moment, but I have to go to work. If this install fails, that's it for Win8.

I thought Microsoft had gotten past these kind of issues with Win7. Apparently not. This company never learns.

It gets even better. Lenovo laptops that come with Windows 8 have a bug where they can't upgrade to higher-priced versions of Windows through the Windows Anytime Upgrade. Microsoft says they're working on a fix.

Marvelous.

Update -- it looks like, this time, it got through the install procedure. The ASUS has rebooted and now shows the Win8 logo, the clock circles and a legend that says, "Preparing 10%." It's said that for several minutes. I really should get to work, but the suspense is killing me.

I came home to it installed. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to get out of that stupid Metro screen and back to a desktop. First thing I installed was Start 8. Whew! What a relief! Next was Chrome, followed by Dashlane. Now if feels like one of my computers.

It does seem much faster than Win 7 (this is a tiny netbook). I may consider adding memory and an SSD.

Now, maybe someone can explain this: the screen looks funny. The proportions of the fonts seem all wrong -- a little squished.
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Edited to Add

Okay, I figured it out myself. I had to download the driver directly from Intel and run it in Win7 compatibility mode. It gave me an error message, but still managed to install and all proportions are correct again. The problem was that the screen on the ASUS net book is 1366 x 768, but Win 8's driver only supported 1024 x 768.