Mr Snrub

TechNet has ISO images for the Swedish flavours of Windows 8, here are just hte 64-bit ones:

It's in the same place on Windows 8 - move the cursor to the bottom-right corner when you have the desktop up, and left-click.

http://windowsteambl...ers-at-wpc.aspx

Yes, booting the physical machine from a USB memory stick or DVD would be considered "bare metal" - and that would have worked, as your update indicates the problem was the change you made to the Data Execution Prevention setting within your current OS installation.Glad you figured it out though

We would need to know the results of testing to install Win8 RP on the physical machine, to identify if it is a CPU check that fails on that hardware (and if so, get all the details about the hardware), or specific to VirtualBox with its virtualized presentation of the hardware. -X-, would you have the possibility to test a bare metal install on that system?

From bugcodes.h: 0x5D == UNSUPPORTED_PROCESSOR Installed Win8 RP x86 and x64 versions from the ISOs in Hyper-V VMs without a problem. I guess VirtualBox needs an update for its emulated processor type.

RSAT for Win8 RP is also available in x86 and x64 flavours: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=28972

Announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2012/May12/05-31Windows8RPPR.aspx Release Preview page: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/release-preview (Note the small link if you want to go to select an ISO instead)

Build 8400 (Release Candidate) ISO & VHD links on this page: http://technet.micro...r/hh670538.aspx (Page briefly reverted from "Release Candidate" back to "Beta" shortly after initial posting, but it's back again now - check the name of the file has 8400 and not 8250 to be sure you don't waste your bandwidth!)

So you have 2 physical disks, both with an active partition and Windows 7 installed, and your BIOS doesn't want to keep the SSD disk higher in the boot priority list over the SATA disk? The BIOS is unfortunately in control of the first stage of the startup process - enumerating devices and locating the first active partition. Are you definitely changing the boot order in the BIOS configuration saving the change, you're not just hitting ESC or an F-key during the POST and selecting the SSD disk from the boot menu (i.e. a one-time boot selection), are you? You could try marking the partition on the SATA disk as inactive, in the hope that the BIOS will then find the first active partition on the next (SSD) disk down the list and continue booting: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465(v=ws.10).aspx (Make sure to read the notes on the ACTIVE and INACTIVE commands carefully.) i.e. The following will give you the details on partition y on disk x (so you can verify you have the right partition selected before changing anything): LIST DISK SEL DISK x LIST PART SEL PART y DET PART Before doing anything from the partition perspective, make sure you have a bootable Windows 7 install media to hand (DVD or USB stick) so you can undo your changes from the WinPE environment if the system becomes unbootable.

Of your 9 listed recommendations, I agree with only: 4. Use Disk Cleanup Tool 7. Sleep or Hibernate you PC when not using It. 9. Get a good Security program to protect yourself. Having more processes running but not doing anything will not consume any CPU time, and will eventually get its working set trimmed so it doesn't consume physical memory if something else requires it. Defragmentation is highly overrated in my experience, with the exception of files used for startup - which are automatically defragged & relocated over time by the system itself. I suspect most people run regular defrags to get a warm fuzzy feeling when it says it is done, or the disk is 0% fragmented, but have never performed any tests to prove it made any difference. Turning off services, especially Windows Update, is a really bad idea - you may think that the services are not "needed" because you don't know what they do, or don't notice any immediate impact of turning them off, but those that are running are either required or not a big overhead or security risk. At least there was nothing there about relocating or resizing the pagefile