Good idea and will look into it when I get a moment.

Thanks for the opinion and good advice. I'll consult my credit card balances and see if it's feasible right now. When on a pension one has to do a lot of calculations...LOL.

Shawn,

Would you suspect your other drives in this situation and replace them? They were the originals put there by Alienware way back when. I have another drive of the same model that failed:...

Then all I have to do is format is thoroughly and discard.

My life story, panic attacks then profuse excuses for the false alarms....!! LOL.

:doh:

(The story is that my C drive #0 failed yesterday taking my main and spare Vista OS's with it. So am...

I installed Windows 8 in my last partition by running the setup from my C: drive. I never burned the image to a disk, which of course I can do. I now find for some reason the 8 is unbootable...

You can type a word on the Start screen to initiate a search. I was referring the the S section of the Tutorial Index. Anyway, it seems you are slowly getting there, good luck ;-)

I know the frustration believe me. I can only answer one or two pointd, maybe Brink can answer others.

If those batch commands need elevated/Admin authority you can make a shortcut to en elevated...

I haven't tried this myself but this is extracted from an old MSDN post regarding Windows 7 and should work for 8:



First, pin a shortcut for cmd.exe to the taskbar.
Right click the shortcut...

It's not an account. Allison Brown is a demo mode available only to retail outlets selling the software. If you are a retail outlet then consult with your local Microsoft Support.

Well I sort of disabled mine by setting it to go on at a time when the machine is powered off. It's also easier for me because 8 isn't my every day system. I normally use Vista.

By the way, you...

See here: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2632-automatic-maintenance-change-maintenance-settings-windows-8-a.html

Also some other tutorials are linked at the foot of that post.

Yes, I realised that after I'd posted, sorry about that. Did you check that screensavers are disabled, because they will turn on even if your actual screen is off unless they are disabled.
...

What make and model is the laptop? Do you have screen savers turned off?

Do you have any Grid Computing software installed, e.g. BOINC for seti@home etc. etc.?

It's most likely the defragmenter, but I would also suspect any proprietary software that the manufacturer/retailer has onboard as they may be scanning for "upgrades".

Except by all accounts that button is going to be hidden unless hovered over and doesn't bring back the old style Start Menu. I'll stick with Stardock's Start8, thanks.

I guess my 6 OS's in a multi-boot here pale by comparison to that. ;-)

I also posted it on Microsoft Answers Forum. I'm sure it will get an icy response there, if any.

;-)

I feel compelled to reproduce here what a friend of mine in the UK just posted on another forum in response to similar posts to what has been written in this thread, thanks Terry:


So well said.

Some may benefit from this training brochure put out in .pdf format by Microsoft.

Download Windows 8 End User Training Brochure from Official Microsoft Download Center

Yes indeed.

Courtesy of Beta News/Wayne Williams:

Most memorable part for me at least:


Everything you need to know about Windows 8.1

Same here, it all depends on what your ISP is offering so you should ask them.

That's also true of the 32 bit versions.

SP3 is needed to qualify for the use of an upgrade license (for a clean install).

I imagine that there aren't many XP X64 home users who were...

64-bit XP (with or without SP2) cannot be upgraded to any other system. You will have to do a clean installation.