Thank you very much for your suggestion, but I recently upgraded to 8.1 from 8.0, which involved a lot of difficulty as, first, my windows 8.1 trial license expired and I kept getting a message saying boot configuration data missing. The problem ultimtely had to be solved by rebooting my whole laptop. All this hppened three months go and I do not want to go thorugh the whole process again.
I would appreciate it very much if there was another solution which I could consider before re-installing windows 8.1 all over again. I would like to keep that as the last resort.