I have been having this problem intermittently but as of yesterday, it has become more consistent. It originally started when I rebooted my PC at home and the OS (Windows 8) sat in a loop appearing to do nothing while loading. I figured since this was a new installation, that something may have just become corrupted and I decided to reinstall. So I tried to boot off of the thumb drive which had the installation iso and encountered pretty much the same issue. Same with the DVD drive. So, I rebooted once again and left it to load the entire night just to see if it ever would and sure enough this morning, Windows had finally loaded. Authentication had the same roblem albeit not quite as long (took about 5 minutes to authenticate). However, once I was in, everything appeared to be working fine and as quick as normal with the exception of when I tried to scan the C drive for any errors, which ran unbearably slow (45 minutes and before I left for work and was not finished scanning a 64GB SSD drive).

I mention that I have had this issue but never when loading the OS. Before it occurred when trying to install windows 7 from a different DVD drive than the one I have now. It took me about 3 hours to do it since I had to wait sometimes 30+ min for each step to finish processing.

Does anyone have an idea as to what can cause this? I am assuming it is the motherboard since it is responsible for communication with all the devices I'm having issues with but I cannot find anyone else who has had a problem like this and don't want to drop more money on a MB if it isn't the problem.

Hardware:

• Motherboard: Asus M4A78T-E Socket AM3/ AMD 790GX/ Hybrid CrossFireX
• Hard Drive: Kingston SSDNow V+180 64GB Micro SATA II 3GB/S 1.8 Inch Solid State Drive SVP180S2/64G
• Optical Drive: Samsung Blu-Ray Combo Internal 12XReadable and DVD-Writable Drive with Lightscribe SH-B123L/BSBP

Thanks, Derek