I've just got a new 8.1 PC &, when I was setting it up, it gave me the option of whether I wanted Skydrive or not (it SPECIALLY stated that it could be removed later). On the basis of being able to remove it, I accepted it!

It now appears that I was misled & that you cannot remove it!! It now appears I have to re-load Win 8.1 from scratch again! Not bad having to re-build a PC only 48hrs after initial install!

Regards,
John

NB:- I've already suffered from "losing" a document because of SkyDrive - I thought I'd saved it to "Documents", but it transpires that there is both a Skydrive "Documents" & a PC "Documents". Even though I have sorted this out & made Word (et al) default to the proper "Documents", it still seems to try to want to force me into Skydrive, which I don't want!

A disappointing oversight from Microsoft indeed - unfortunately 99% of people are happy putting data in the cloud for the UK and US government to snoop on it. They should know better.

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

A disappointing oversight from Microsoft indeed - unfortunately 99% of people are happy putting data in the cloud for the UK and US government to snoop on it. They should know better.

Agreed.

I already have my own Cloud provision, where I save everything to, hence I really do NOT need another & conflicting location!

I've got rid of my Dropbox account last month... Google & Skydrive aren't used much and I'll make sure all the files uploaded are encrypted...

You can get rid of it, you the simplest way is just to put your computer as a local account. the problem is that if you want to use sky drive as it used to be on windows 8 or 7 even, then you can't as the app will not work.

I have still not updated my windows 8 to 8.1.

I'll make sure all the files uploaded are encrypted...

You really think you are that interesting?

Tragic!

Bit disparaging! No one is THAT interesting including yourself.

I've been using Win 8 (10 months) on a laptop and 8.1 (about 3 months) on a 4 year old desktop. I have to say from a performance point of view both machine are quicker. I'm not that fussed about the tiles though One thought I did have, from Microsoft point of view are they hindering sales of PC's if Windows users may put off upgrading their machines because their machine are getting an extended lease of life? Or is this just my experience?

For cloud backup / sync encryption I use Spideroak, downside is only 2Gb free then paid after that, but that is enough for me.

In reply to a post by Oscar2013:

One thought I did have, from Microsoft point of view are they hindering sales of PC's if Windows users may put off upgrading their machines because their machine are getting an extended lease of life? Or is this just my experience?

Windows 8 is hindering sales by keeping people on XP/Vista/7

And what is wrong with that ? There is no real advantage in upgrading, aside from some flashy rectangles...