I also went from XP to W/8, as explained here , and with Classic Shell it is like XP but overall better. But read thru the above for some other tips.
IE crashes constantly. I
But why even use IE except for updates. Firefox, actually Pale Moon , which is far far superior to IE, and Chrome if you are a "power user." There is even an extension than can enable posting in HTML here easier for those who do not know it (or have stiff fingers like me).
've avoided LINUX because people have said you'll spend a lot of time learning it, configuring it etc.
This is quite true despite hype, some more so than others, often even if you want to do most of what you can rather easily do with Windows, unless its just Internet and Word processing. In addition is the illegality of certain proprietary multimedia codecs. I found Xubuntu to be best for older hardware.
Libre Office saved me a lot of grief when I discovered a lot of my files could not be opened unless I paid an outrageous prices for Works per year.
Right now I'm also getting what I'm certain is false hits on Avast. Dell has an updater {Cloud Back Up} built in that for me is quite annoying as in 50-100MB upload annoying and I haven't figured out how to disable that. About a week ago it stopped uploading which is fine by me. Now it shows as W32:Dropper-Gen on Avast alert pop up. I have a chest full of them LOL. I ran about six different programs scanning it including Hitman Pro. The computer was fairly clean.
Really the only think about Tabs I dislike is being able to tell what Tab is what and the increased risk of closing all pages with one click. With Windows Tabs I know where I'm at.
Just skimmed the Pale Moon site- is it a 64-bit Firefox build for Windows? I went with Waterfox when Firefox wouldn’t play nice with Win8 and it’s been glitch-free since version 28 (prior versions couldn’t auto-update in Win8.1).