OK - having taken all day to transfer from vista to Windows 8 - caused by my OH.
He suggested it would be a good idea to do transfer via a network connection, so I had both laptops next to each other and near to the router, installed Easy Transfer onto Vista and set the transfer going between the two laptops, then OH decided he wanted to see if he'd got any e-mails. The effect was that the transfer stopped with an error message and each time I tried again, I got the same message. So OH said I could transfer using the hard disc we have. I told him I didn't need to do a back up first because the easy transfer system did it, but would he listen - what do you think. So he set the hard disc to do a back up, which took 2 hours, then when I started the transfer again, guess what the easy transfer programme does its own back up - so another 2 hours wasted. Aaaagh. Whilst I was transferring from the hard drive to the new laptop, I thought I'd do some work on the other laptop by downloading an unzipping a file - but it wouldn't work, I got a message saying I didn't have permission to unzip the file. As it was for transcription work that I've been doing for over 2 years and I have unzipped files all the time, I don't know wha
Fortunately, most things have been transferred, but I still can't open Window documents. So at last I'm going to try the fixes suggested above. Wish me luck.