Howard

Thanks for your reply. After I installed windows8 pro upgrade the boot took only about 15 seconds to boot up. I've not added anything else after configuring email, which works fine and the bootup remained the same time. This continued for several days. Suddenly, it started playing up taking up to 15 mins to complete. I did notice that, although the spinning wheel was working, the hard drive light showed that there was no apparent activity for about 5 minutes. The light then showed activity and the win 8 logon screen was displayed. However, after entering the login info it took about a minute to log on until the win 8 desktop showed. I thought that maybe the drive was faulty, but trying to use chkdsk from the command prompt wouldn't work, asking for elevated permission whatever that meant. It MAY not have said permission but another similar word. I have always been able to reinstall windows 7 over itself and that cured my problems. Apparently, from what you say, this probably may not be possible with win 8!!! By the way my win 8 disk is the full retail version. Bad design by Microsoft again?? Anyone maybe point me to the problem I would be VERY grateful

I installed the windows8 pro over win7. Suddenly, the boot now takes 5mins to complete. The boot up was only 10 seconds up to today, making me suspect a corrupt file. If I reinstall windows8 upgrade over itself, will I lose all of my settings?