For a productive Win 8.x, I might suggest checking out some of the posts by NoelC over at MSFN such as this one. He does most, if not all, of his setup manually, but he avoids interacting with "Metro" at all costs and strives to make his Win 8.x system look and act as much like Win 7 as possible. He even wrote an e-book about how to set up such a system yourself that you can find mentioned here. At US $20 it's less than half what NTlite costs so maybe that might appeal to you more. Just a thought. Cheers and Regards