HarryTri

I found a freeware program that is called System Explorer and among other things has an interface similar to Autoruns for the startup items: http://systemexplorer.net/

Probably it's just that Windows is "perceiving" itself as newly installed after the change of the product key, hence the "initial" full backup.

That's life... Yet you could just restore your system from your system backups and pay no money. Anyway I don't believe that Microsoft is waiting to make money from people who haven't used it's activation keys for two years, it just happened. At least we know now that these keys expire sooner or later if they are not used (it would be good to know the exact time needed for this to happen).

Windows Defender is to be disabled if you have a "normal" antivirus program installed.

Yes, that's it but the restoral capability must exist somehow in Windows 8.1 too (if not then the system backup is useless, at least for the not-too-geek user). Maybe in the Recovery option in your first image?

How is it possible? I mean a clean install starts with a disk format, doesn't it? Except if the preserved data are copied to another drive first.

That's exactly what I meant but it seems that they moved this functionality to the File History panel per what you say.

It is in Windows 8 and must be in Windows 8.1, have a look at the Control Panel>System and Security>File History and it is in the "See also" section down in the left.

Yes, that's a problem...

You can try using IE8, it isn't so horrible as they say. As for security, I think the post-SP3 updates (I suppose you have SP3), a good antivirus and - ideally - a good router with firewall will suffice.

There is also the "Windows 7(?) file restore" or something like that (I translate from Greek) in the control panel which in fact has to do with disk backups - as I found by chance - and is probably the GUI analog to wbadmin.

Well, everything seems to be a driver issue. As I found in the web a lot of people have this problem not only with Conexant but with Realtek high definition audio devices too. In all the cases - including mine and that's what I ended up to - installing the Windows generic drives for high definition audio solves the problem. A conflict of the OEM drives with a Windows Update or something else (thought I uninstalled most of my programs trying to find a cause of the problem to no avail), who knows? Anyway at least there is a working alternative/solution at least.

The sound disappeared again... It was the only time that the sound came back without a reboot and it seems that it was a weird coincidence. I run a system diagnostic and it says that everything is all right... I don't know what to think of anymore.

I found it! \Microsoft\Windows\Multimedia\SystemSoundsService in Task Scheduler. I stopped it and the sound came back immediately!. I deactivated it of course...

Thanks for the reply. I tried to troubleshoot the problem by watching the sound function and checking what is writen in the event logs at the time that it disappears and l ended up disabling the Lenovo Security Center service, this seems to make the difference as far as I don't open Lenovo Security Center (version 2.4.003) itself. I hope that this is really the cause, you can much more easier copy with a problem if you know what causes it. No, it wasn't... either. Noel, if you remember something more about what you red please tell me.

http://nicbedford.co.uk/software/systemrestoreexplorer/

I have a very strange problem with my laptop (Lenovo G500, Windows 8). Some time - about 5 minutes - after booting the sound is disappearing suddenly. This is joined with problems like Windows Media Player reporting inability to play any sound files and Internet Explorer 10 being unable to play YouTube videos (but Mozilla Firefox can - without sound of course). All this are reverted with a reboot and then it happens just the same. A little search in the web revealed that other people also have the same problem even with Windows 7 but I didn't find a solution. The weird thing is that the Windows sound service and the related services are working and all the devices in the Device Manager are reported to be alright and there is no error message in any of the Windows event logs. The lack of sound affects both the speakers and the headphones I used to test. The sound device is Conexant SmartAudio HD and there is also Dolby Advanced Audio. Any thoughts anyone?

Have a look at the BIOS also to see if there is anything "strange". I had my own nightmare with my Lenovo G500 laptop. Four times it failed to configure the Windows Updates after restore from the restore partition, at 98% it displayed the message "Failure configuring Windows updates. Reverting changes." and I was almost driven crazy, I even contacted Lenovo support and arranged to send the laptop to them (the warranty is still void), finally I found the answer in the C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER folder (WER = Windows Error Reporting, you can have a look there for any error information, especially at the CBS.log - the end of it - and the .wer files - open them with notepad). What happened is that I had naively changed - and forgot about it afterwards - the Secure Boot status/mode from Disabled/Setup mode/Custom to Enabled/User mode/Standard (I found it strange that the Secure Boot status was reported as disabled whereas Secure Boot was enabled) and Windows couldn't update the Secure Boot firmware! I reverted the change and the problem was solved...

In order to retrieve individual files from System Restore points you can use System Restore Explorer with which you can mount them as virtual drives.

Thanks for the information about storage spaces, they are available in Windows 8 Home (or just Windows 8 in contrast with Windows 8 Pro) but you need some more drives. I suppose that you can use virtual drives for the job too but I don't have much initiative to experiment on it at the moment.

Maybe it is intended to boot in EFI mode?

"Storage Spaces" are RAID arrays or I am wrong?

I made two very simplistic benchmarks in FreeBASIC (windows console mode) that test the CPU. The one is for single core, not multithreading processors (1 thread) and the other for processors that run up to 4 threads simultaneously. Example results are as follow: 1+ MIPS for an Intel Pentium III 1 GHz processor (the multithreaded one gives a bit higher score than the other), 50+ MIPS (single threaded) and 150+ MIPS (multithreaded - 100% CPU usage) for an Intel Core i5-3230M 2.6 GHz (with TurboBoost up to 3.2 GHz - enabled) processor (2 cores - 4 threads). The single thread one is very simple, as simple as it could be, the other was a bit more difficult to make because of multithreading (no previous experience, the FreeBASIC help file helped a lot). I attach the programs and the source code. Please don't lough at me! Benchmarks.zip

Adobe Flash Player is implemented in Windows 8 (or IE 10/11, I'm not sure). ? http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/flash-player-issues-windows-8.html

A bit out of the conversation but I said the bad word, let's say the good too. PCMark 8 is a behemoth (2890 MB download) but it seems good. It is EIST aware and some of its tests stress the CPU quite a bit. You see the results online but a detailed log is saved in your documents folder too. I did two tests initially, one with EIST enabled - score 2151 and one with EIST disabled - score 2149, anyway as I said PCMark is for the first time EIST aware and it doesn't make a difference anyway. It also has OpenCL testing option which hangs on my laptop - who knows why - on the 4th of the 8 subtests but is still an interesting option. If someone has the time to download it and the disc space to install it then it is something that I can recommend.