LF advice for modem user

I'm a senior on fixed income with 56k dialup Internet access who has been given an HP Pav 23 touch screen PC with Win 8.1. I read Win 8 for Seniors and Win 8 Secrets where they advise logging on using a MS account but I'm wondering if this is for people with high speed access. Should I stick with an account on the PC and the desktop apps? Are there things I can do to minimize bandwidth usage on this new to me computer? Thanks for your help.

P.S. Currently using Win XP on a Dell Dimension, and have a USB modem for the HP Pav. Have not tried the HP yet.

Will you have only the one Win 8.x computer? If so, I'm not sure using a MS account to login would benefit you at all. Using a MS Account with multiple Win 8 or Win 10 computers allows the computers to sync certain settings with each other. If you'll only have the one computer (the XP computer doesn't count in this scenario) then I don't think you'll see any benefit.

The speed of your internet access doesn't have much, if any, impact on whether you should use a MS account or not.

You can minimize how much gets downloaded and when to a certain extent by setting updates so that they only download when you check for them manually. That way, you may be able to only do that when you have access to a faster connection (if that ever occurs).