WF - No LAFFING! Ok - I'm grinning too, but NO LAFFING. It's really NOT FUNNY. I'm trying to be serious here. . . .STOP IT. ..(grin) I get these STUPID calls this time of year - from friends that went shopping - and didn't have ANY form of protection. . . .I just want to hand them my credit card and tell them to throw the machine out the window. I'm serious. . .tis the season. That and the "what should I buy" stuff with those ads - every freakin' ad that comes out in some da*mn newspaper. . .trying to explain to someone NOT to purchase anything with a celeron - an athalon is fine - watch out for this, that and 15 other things. I go into a complete psychosis at this time of year! No laughing! Comonnnnnnnnnn. . . .(grin) I just wanna play in the dirt! Leave me alone! Buy a set of crayons and write your order! (very sarcastic grin) Speaking of . . .I have to go in tomorrow and fix a corrupted profile from someone who can't stop surfin' . .jeez I'd like to slap some people. . . .and then re-write an app that is misbehaving. . .the users won't use the command buttons right so I have to "disable" some of those in the application. Ya know, how many times do you have to tell people not to "crash" out of a shared database? Want me to draw PICTURES FOR YOU?!?!?! I'm gonna disable the red X. Stopped the corruption in the other ones when I disabled it. No laughing - this time of year stinks for some of us. LOL. . .(sigh!)

PROGESS ! Ok, have run Malwarebyte - 0 threats detected. Ran Superspyware scan and found 231 seemingly harmless adware tracking cookies and 1 critical threat. Seems a Rogue.agent was lurking. I quarantined and removed all 232 and rebooted. YEA me ! Next, I was going to run the Ccleaner, but had questions (of course), so I'm back to ask: At the bottom of the cleaner page are two options ~ 1 says ANALYZE the second says RUN CLEANER. When I clicked on the latter I warned me that a ton of stuff was about to be pushed of a cliff, so I left it and clicked on ANALYZE. From there, I saw a list of just what was about to be deleted and thus my concern and question: Is it really alright to delete the following: 159 files - windows explorer - recent documents 16,017 files - temporary internet 8,826 files - System temporary 50 files - applications - office 2007 48 files - applications - office xp 513 files - utilities - AVG 2012 Some other things seemed to be pretty huge, but with few files (Windows Explorer Thumbnail Cache - 1,794,021,021 KB -5 files). I'm sure this all seems like small potatoes to you guys, but because I don't understand a lot of what I'm seeing and am just learning what to clean up on my PC,these choices seem daunting. Will put off the Cclean until I get the go ahead. Many thanks. I'm truly beginning to feel empowered !

Owbist, thanks I do like the fast boot on W8 - even with the switch to Desk Top, which to my simple needs is like being back in W7, it is a much shorter wait to start browsing or getting email. Mikie, not sure I "know and love" playing with the BIOS, but in the past I have had occasions to need to. Mostly that goes back to W95 days. Or even the 3.x whatever was before '95. You seem to be suggesting a 3rd party recovery tool. As I noted Gateway provides a tool to image the HDD as well as restore to factory fresh - as I have already uninstalled Norton I assume that would be Factory Fresh less Norton which is fine with me. What I miss was W7 had a DVD boot capability and Toshiba provided me with the tools to create a repair DVD, separate from a restore DVD... I liked that, it prevented me form doing damage by clicking on the wrong button. I suppose the Gateway restore doesn't proved direct access to F8. I do recall tapping F8 during a boot in XP and earlier to get into the BIOS..you seem to be saying (to my reading) that W8 doesn't let one get to the BIOS until the password is satisfied. I don't know if that is different in W7, I have never gone to the BIOS in my W7 machines. I have had to boot the Toshiba notebook off of the Repair DVD a couple of times and it saved my "bacon". On Password, in W7 I could easily change or remove the password.. that seems to be buried deeper in W8. Is it even possible to run W8 without an administrative password protected logon? My giant 17.3" Gateway will likely not be taken out of the house, a password isn't needed - well if a crook breaks into my house it would be better if I has some protection on all computers... problem is W8 ended up with a very complicated password that resulted from my initial start up of the machine..as I recall it had something to do with a password for my Microsoft account, and being external I wanted a secure PW, in fact MS may have required it.

See my thread on Windows versus Linux MINT ... Buying a new computer because you are having problems with the software is not necessary. Spend a couple of hours and you can have a minty-fresh system :) ============= Back up your data files to somewhere safe, export your bookmarks and stored passwords (Firefox has an add-on that will show you the site and password - screen grab it) and e-mail them to yourself at an on-line account. DELETE your data AND/OR then compact your hard drive like this: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000528.htm Then download and "burn the ISO" for Linux Mint (if you insert a blank DVD and then double-click the Mint "iso" file, your DVD burner should do it automatically). Then reboot your system with the Mint DVD in it and follow the instructions. It's REALLY easy. You can choose whether to keep the Windows installation or not, and you can decrease the Windows file space by sliding the divider bar towards the left. NOTES: Libre Office can read your MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files. You will be able to READ the Windows part from Linux, so you can retrieve files . I haven't tried the reverse, and I haven't tried writing to the Windows side. Linux has "WINE" which lets you run most Windows software, including MS Office.