[Scott Douglas]

John, Yes, I have an HP computer. I'm not sure if it was an HP app or not. The screen had the HP label on it, but it looked like it might just have been a very basic low level screen ie nothing was running. It had the 'circle' of spiralling balls going around on it, which I think is MS doing its thing.

I've been playing around some, took the side cover off and vac'd out the computer, removed the heat sink/fan from the cpu and cleaned it, cleaned the heat sink on the video card too.
On booting up after that I got a message that said Windows didn't load correctly what did I want to do. Got all the way into refreshing but backed down at the last screen.
How do I go about reloading Windows from the recovery portion of my HD?
It says it won't mess with my files.
OK, I'm good with that.
Does that mean it will just re-load Windows from that partition onto the 'main' partition?
When looking at device manager(?) I saw that HP Assistant takes up a lot of CPU time/space. I thought I'd disabled that a long time ago. Guess not.