Like mentioned already above, as soon as the boot loader starts press the down arrow key. That will give you time to read the other options.

If you want to start a session with other OS just select it with the down or up arrows and hit enter to select.

Good luck to you

Hello

We have solved the problem by using the down arrow and then flicking up and down while I wrote all the options down. The first two are the linux generic then recovery. There are then two called memory test then two windows 7 ones. The only problem with those was that it did not say which was recovery. We assumed the first must be the "normal" one - this proved to be the case. Thanks for all your sugestions.
Glad my simple idea proved right and you confirmed it would work Spikey0011.

Cheers Margaret