Chrissie, you need to forgive us if we are frightening you during our (or possibly just my) discussion on W8.
It's not quite as bad as the impression I may have given you
We're just trying to get to the bottom of what it's doing, and talking out loud!
Yes it is IMHO 'built around constant on' technology - much like virtually every smartphone these days is. In fact, MS have deliberately chosen W8 to be (more or less) the same version and so have the same look and feel on any platform, whether it is a desktop PC, a tablet, or a smartphone. That's why it looks and feels more like a smartphone that the windows you know. The 'constant on' thing is what allows it to present info from the various apps to you on the tile, _even_ when you haven't opened the app, e.g. it will tell you how many new emails you have, or what the weather will be tomorrow. But all this stuff can be switched off. It's just that by default, a lot of it is on.
The 'windows live' login is the normal default on W8, but as you may not have one or the guy who built it for you didn't know what it was, he has most probably changed it to the normal kind of login you are familiar with. So no need to worry about that either.
However, to make these things sort of 'work' out of the box, like a smartphone, a lot of these things are set up like that - to expect to have an internet connection and to use it. The discussion following from that is just that when it boots up, it probably tries to find the router to establish those connections even before you login. Hence the chance that if the router doesn't like or understand something about that it may appear to be acting strangely.
What I meant about it _potentially_ changing (some) things was that, as you will know from XP, if you restart from a hibernated PC, you just get the machine exactly as you left it. Since W8 does this by default (starts from hibernation, so that it loads faster) every time, unless it did something special, if you updated a driver it would never know. So, it sort of 'reloads' the drivers (and some other things) every time - but that only matters if they have changed of course!!
What you saw this morning, and on two other ocassions you have mentioned on this thread
was not normal at all. Windows should
not normally be doing this. It is a sign that something is going wrong while W8 is booting. It has (IMO)
nothing to do with all the other router stuff we have been talking about. Which is why I say, at some point, you should 'tell the guy' it is happening, if it keeps doing that. 3 times already is decidedly
not normal.
I've had alook at the link you've so kindly provided. Without going into boring details, I really don't think this applies to you.
It is about problems caused to some people who use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), and I am pretty sure you wouldn't use one of those.
So, please be reassured. Although W8 is not what perhaps you would like, it can be 'tamed' i.e. reconfigured to switch most of these smartphone-type-things off, and you can just use the desktop as normal, even if they force us to use the Metro screen first!
I hope to be able to give you some detailed instructions tomorrow on how to switch off the 'network discovery' whizzo stuff that I think just might possibly be upsetting your router. Then if you can possibly try that, we can see if it makes any difference to you.
