Thanks guys.
Happy with it so far. Copying over many GB's of files across Wifi from my old laptop to the new one is a little painful
Installed 8.1, installed Office365, all my other programs are getting installed one by one. Trying to get it finished for the first commute back to work on Monday
I'm using desktop pretty much exclusively now. I can't see why I'd ever go back to the Metro interface, but I'm not sure if that means I'm missing out on something amazing?
My daughter got a new HP Pavillion laptop for xmas, and it has Win8 on it and she's still using metro for the most part, but her use of a computer is much different to mine. I guess if you spend most of the day browsing and consuming content or playing games, then metro is probably nice.
The slow harddrive is definitely noticeable compared to the SSD. I'll still likely get a 480GB SSD and copy everything over. It means taking out the blu-ray but I'm unlikely to use that anyway.
So far so good but haven't given it a real test of speed yet.