The Utter Failure of my Windows 8.1 Upgrade

Counter-point: my upgrade was "smooth" in that it worked and there were no surprises.

That said, there were definitely issues. Firstly, I couldn't find the update. It wasn't showing up in the store. Turns out I had to run Windows Update first then go to the store. Fair enough, but would it have killed Microsoft to put a banner in the store saying "Want to upgrade to 8.1? First click here to make sure your computer is up to date."

Secondly, it restarted several times (why so many?), often with completely unhelpful messages about what it's actually doing (my favourite was a message something like "now just doing a few more things..." – yeah, thanks). And progress meters that would stall at e.g. 13% for minutes before suddenly finishing.

As for 8.1 itself, it's definitely a step up for me. Just having a start button back and being able to set the start menu background to be the same as your desktop background makes the whole experience far less claustrophobic. The settings to change that were quite deeply hidden away though; I'm surprised I found them.

Also, it sets the mouse-over highlight animation on the start button to be the same colour as the start menu, even if that isn't the colour of the taskbar, which made it clash weirdly in my case. But that's a relatively minor complaint on the scale of things.

Edit: Also, thanks to Hacker News, I knew to expect the "dark pattern" of not giving you an option not to login with a Microsoft account unless you try logging in first with an incorrect password and then it gives you the option. If it weren't for that, I think I'd be very irritated – but then, Apple are guilty of something similar when setting up OS X (I think it's the "Do you want to register your computer?" screen, which you can escape by pressing Apple+Q and it gives the option to quit, but how anyone is meant to guess that is beyond me.)

I'm not sure what the point of this blog post is? I don't think anyone expects that the upgrade will be problem free for 100% of users, especially considering the numerous different hardware configurations.

Also, if you look on the Apple Support forums you'll find people who have encountered problems upgrading OS X, so it is not like OS X has a 100% success rate at upgrading.

I've upgraded my machine from 8 to 8.1 and it went flawlessly, although I did not write a blog post about that.

Perhaps a good place to start would be attempting to look into the BSOD rather than just attempting the upgrade over and over?

> Windows 8.1 - Open the marketplace, click the button, download, prepare for installation, reboot, begin installation, verify installation, hang, blue screen, reboot, hang, blue screen, reboot, revert to previous installation, reboot.

This has not been my experience, at all, on 4 different machines. It was more:

Open the marketplace, click the button, download, ask for reboot, reboot, wait for a bit of time (between 15' and 30' depending on the machine), and boot to the new login upgrade.

I had a bit of a headache to understand how not to upgrade to a Microsoft account and keep a local account, but that's it.

It is unfortunate that you had problems upgrading and I feel your frustration (been there and it sucks) but... You cannot compare Windows upgrades with OS X upgrades for the simple reason that Apple dictates and extensively tests all the hardware components that go into the mac for compatibility. The number of hardware components and combination of components that Windows has to support is substantially larger than OS X's and it is not feasible to expect that Microsoft (and its partners) will be able to test every possible combination. I do not like Windows but comparing OS X upgrade issues with Windows upgrade issues is naive.

My biggest complaint on 8.1 is the removal of windows 7 backup[1]; at least the easy way to do it. They left it in windows 8 - I was using it; dropped my laptop ended up restoring to 8 again and that's where I'll stay for now.. I think their push was to use skydrive but a mirror to the cloud isn't an image.

[1]http://www.howtogeek.com/167984/how-to-create-and-restore-sy...

I'm not sure why MS decided that the release of a free upgrade of their product that's trying to address pain points with Metro would be great opportunity to shove the Windows Store down users' throats. I can't even open Windows Store on my media center PC (hooked up to a 720p television) without increasing my screen resolution past native. That's just irritating.

Do you realize that your Windows 8 license key will not allow you to download and do a clean install of 8.1? You need to download 8.0, install 64 or so important updates, and only then are you deemed worthy of being eligible to download 8.1 through the Windows Store. Who thought this up?

I went the clean install route after my upgrade from 8.1 preview stalled out on the "Almost There" screen for 15 minutes. I rebooted, and all references to my installed applications were gone.

All in all, the 8.1 upgrade wasn't a pleasant experience.

I just updated from the 8.1 Pro Preview. Everything went smoothly. It's just that the upgrade removed every program from my system and every form of application data. I have backups but that means reverting back to the preview. Four hours of re-installs later, I still have a two month gap in my Thunderbird email data. Sigh! I think this is gratuitous - perhaps MS is trying to stampede everyone into using their cloud based storage,

I upgraded 2 laptops and a PC to 8.1 without a single problem. I didn't have too many complaints before but I'm definitely happy with the changes.

FWIW, Microsoft pulled the 8.1 RT update given the amount of bad installs:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57608310-75/microsoft-yank...

They had to pull the Windows RT 8.1 update because it left some devices un bootable.

I had no problems. My friends had no problems. What were we doing wrong?

I upgraded to 8.1 yesterday on a home-built AsRock Extreme 4 with i7-3770 with 16 GB RAM and OCZ Vertex 4 SSD. Whole process took 10 minutes and performed perfectly.

Sorry you had an issue, but wanted to point out that it is working smoothly for many people.