What to do?

Over the years you learn a thing or two about computers, however, you must be up to date with the intricacies of hardware and software. 

Case in point: If Windows did not boot up or you were in need of running in safe mode you simply pushed the F8 while booting. Well, if you have Windows 10 installed that might not be the case anymore. According to the developers Windows 10 is too fast to boot and pressing the F8 key might not hit the mark. Although some times I have the feeling that molasses flows faster than the boot process takes place. 
In any event, yesterday was such a day were I actually had to look up what the story was with the boot process. The good news is that, after holding the shift key (either one) and click on restart, there are more options for the user to rectify the situation than before. 
To make a long story short, I discovered that the master boot record (MBR) was not willing to cooperate. Even going to the command prompt and trying to do a fix it with chkdsk /f did not accomplish anything. 
Finally, I had to reinstall Windows 10. Luckily there is an option which allows me to keep my personal files so I don't have to go through the backup restore etc etc process for the files. The downside is that I had to reinstall all the programs I use frequently. Hours later I'm back up and running, surprisingly enough much faster (I wonder why?) ...