>>Thank you. Yes, F8 works and I can start the PC in the Safe mode. If I don't figure out why the PC does not restart itself, I will go ahead and try removing the Avast with avastclear.exe in Safe Mode.
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>I would recommend doing a clean install instead. It is a lot of work, but then you get rid of other 'clutter' too. Also, I would recommend upgrading to Win10 as well.

There may be reasons why he's not upgraded to Win 10 (e.g. hardware or software compatibility problem). One of the reasons why I was hesitant was because I'd be losing the XP Mode VM (I was using it to allow me to be able to still run WIn16 and DOS software) that I was using in Win7 Ultimate. I did run into a few snags along the way (with the "in-place" upgrade -- the option you need to do to get the upgrade for free). it also took several attempts too -- fortunately I'd imaged the harddisk prior to doing anything -- this afforded me the ability to revert the system back if something didn't work (and indeed, it went wrong several times). One scary moment was performing the BIOS upgrade (flashing the BIOS could carry the risk of irrevocably "bricking" the system) -- this needed to be done to allow virtualization to operate correctly.

Indeed, I was already aware that an "in-place" upgrade would not always go smoothly -- had experienced that when upgrading from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1. It took several attempts (and several hours as I was restoring the system to original state after each failed attempt) before it worked. If eventually dawned on me (after several failed attempts), that I should change all the hardware drivers to generic ones (especially the video driver). Once that was done, the upgrade took less than 15 minutes. After that was done came the task of locating the appropriate drivers (was able to download the software from the BBSes of the hardware manufacturers -- took a while as I was doing this with a 2400bps modem).

Indeed a clean install is the way to go -- but typically that means you've got to buy a license to be able to activate the OS. At that point, you might wonder "if I'm already going to be spending a hundred bucks just on the OS, and have to re-install all the software *anyway* -- why not simply buy a new computer while I'm at it?" Although buying a new computer is certainly more expense, it might save you a bit of time. If you're buying a new computer with the OS pre-installed, that's a bit of time saved. You're also not having to deal with the potential issues even with a clean install of the newer OS on the older computer.