Hi Checkurtech,
Thanks for your reply and I found it timely.
I have passed your instructions to my friend who is helping me and do to schedules, we will proceed towards towards the end of next week.
On the related, the other day I posted about the 9 Windows updates, of which 5 installed without the need to restart and 4 required restarting. As I mentioned, I was not about to shut the laptop down and every 4 hours (the most extended time period option) I was getting an annoying pop up reminder to restart to finish installing updates. I also had the Windows Update icon in the system tray (taskbar) at the lower right of my screen.
I just noticed that the icon is no longer there and thus, I am not getting prompted to install Windows Updates! The other day I put the Windows Update setting on "Download updates but let me choose whether to install them", which naturally grayed out the "Install new updates" underneath. I do not see why this would have caused the Windows Update icon to go away, for the Updates that were downloaded, but not installed. Prior, I had it set on "Install updates automatically (recommended) and set at "Every day" at "3:00am".
In addition when I go to Control Panel > Security > Windows Updates >, I see a green check mark and it says "No important update available". I then clicked on " View update history" and I see that all 9 updates were successfully installed between 6:41 am and 6:54 am on 2/20/2014!
The only way I can understand this is that the laptop installed the updates and in fact restarted. Is there anyway that the Windows corrupted boot loader could have repaired itself?
I still don't have the confidence to shut down the laptop.
Anovice