Hey thanks everyone and
Bergie532 I'm keeping your instructions for possibly future use.. Have a look Bergie at what I did instead. Maybe your way is even easier.
I found the below instructions on another Win8 help site and this is what they said to do and what I did, let me know if anyone else was thinking of this, it seems the most direct way without involving 3rd party software:
Run the following "command prompt with admin rights" to create a new recovery image. You can place the custom image in any folder or give it any name you like, so feel free to change the “C:\CustomRefreshImages\Image1″ part of the command:
recimg /CreateImage C:\CustomRefreshImages\Image1
This command creates a custom refresh image from the current system state and sets it as the default. When you refresh or reset your PC in the future, your custom image will be used. If this is all you wanted to do, you can stop now.
To create and Switch Between Multiple Images:
Windows 8 allows you to have more than one image. In the future, you can run the command again to create a new image. For example, the following command would create another refresh image known as Image2 and set is as the default image:
recimg /CreateImage C:\CustomRefreshImages\Image2
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Now I haven't had the need to "refresh" yet, but supposedly I can just go to the standard "refresh" (you get to from the charms bar, then settings) and it will bring up MY refresh image, not the "original" refresh that has all the bloatware software that came with the laptop along with the OS. I ran this before I put any of my software on the machine so it will go back to a "clean" refresh.
I would have preferred making my own "restore" image, but apparently, Windows wont let you "restore" your OWN image. I read that there is only ONE restore image allowed and that's the one with all the bloatware.
Funny thing, I also read that MS will sell you a "clean" OS of 8.1 without all the bloatware for $99. Don't know how true that is, but not worth $99 at any rate. Especially when I will probably have to do this all over again with Win 10.