Hi Jean,

Sorry for the delay in responding but I’ve been away from home for a few days.

As to some of your urls being broken, I can’t see any mechanism for that to have been caused by the Mint Live Demo – it runs solely in RAM and does not involve the HD at all. I’ve noticed that both Chrome and Firefox have suddenly become very picky about system time – I had a laptop in last week where many of the bookmarks, including Google, appeared broken. In passing, I noticed that the system time was ten minutes slow. On correction the browsers allowed connection to everything. Must be a tightening of the HTTPS requirements I guess.

You say the RAM is new – I had a surprising recent experience where some Crucial recommended RAM caused numerous booting problems on an upmarket AMD based machine. Crucial, as ever, replaced the RAM without question but the faults remained. Replaced with similar spec Corsair modules and it runs a treat.

If your graphics card manufacturer provides Win8.1 drivers then you’d have expected them to have tested them on Win8.1 so I doubt the model is incompatible. Nevertheless it could still have some partial build fault – Mint may just have been less demanding of it than Win8.1

You say it can’t be the HD so I assume the other drives you’ve tried were installed with Win8.1 and still threw up the same freezing boot error. So we’re running out of culprits – except Win8 itself.

Interestingly, I came back yesterday to find someone had bought in a non-booting Win8.1 Acer laptop. This is the third time this Acer has been in over the last few months, each time displaying different faults. First time, the curser kept jumping back to the start of the line as you typed. Second time, if you clicked on any item on the desktop or in a folder it open the first item rather than the one you’d clicked. Absolutely nuts! This time it was just freezing when the desktop loaded. This turned out to be that Avast antivirus was pulling 95% of the CPU. Never seen Avast do that before but re-installing it cured the problem. The relevance to yours is that having cured the CPU overload fault it would occasionally freeze on start-up – even before the balls started to revolve. In this case, simply touching any key broke the freeze and it then carried on to boot normally. Unfortunately I didn’t get chance to explore this further as, having solved the main fault, the lady needed her laptop tout suite and said she would bring it back some other time. My first thought is that this may be some ‘Pause on Error’ fault in the Uefi (the successor to the BIOS).

Regarding your comment that switching off at the power switch forces a boot. Although doing so is a recipe for disaster, particularly for the hard drive, you are most likely simply discharging all the system’s capacitors – in the same way that removing the battery from a laptop and holding the power button down for 30 seconds can often kick a frozen boot into life – as it also did on the Acer I’ve just done.

Having turned this into War and Peace, yet again, I’ll wrap up by saying I find it interesting that all these weird Win8 symptoms, particularly booting and auto-repair, can be instantly and permanently solved if the client allows me to: change the Uefi to Legacy BIOS (thereby switching off secure boot), reformat the drive to MBR instead of GPT and then install Win7. Controversial, I know, but it is a fact.

There is nothing whatsoever secure about Secure Boot – I’ve never seen so many seriously infected systems. My personal view is that Secure Boot’s real function is to prevent non-technical user from installing Linux which, following the general Win8 debacle and the runaway success of Android, Microsoft are now running scared of. Why else would Microsoft be giving Win10 away for free, if not to try to regain their reputation before getting swept away by the competition? Sad to see.

Not sure if any of this helps you solve your problem but at least I got it all off my chest! 😉

Cheers, Chris