To solve my problem, I eventually managed to mash F8 at just the right time, get the advanced startup menu, and find a restore point that had been set yesterday morning.

And, apparently, it’s a common problem with this update that has yet to be fully resolved for everyone.

And, while it’s certainly good practice to do so, it hadn’t occurred to me that the source of instability would be an OS update. So, pretty much everything you might do to recover the machine in light of an unexpected problem involves you having prepared ahead of time for such a problem. I figured I could make one, but all of the guides about making Windows 8 recovery CDs/USB Drives all seemed to start with “boot into Windows 8 and…” Double sigh. I figured I could boot from some kind of media, but none shipped with the PC. It appeared as though the only way to boot into safe mode was to launch the OS normally and enable it. At this point, I tried to boot into safe mode, but there are apparently six different ways to do it and three of them don’t work because Windows 8 is too fast or something. Let it go for another half hour, nothing. I did a hard reset, and it booted right back into that screen. I let this go for around 45 minutes before figuring there must be something wrong. Except, this time it got to 99% installed, stayed there for a really long time, and then eventually came back with the message:

Whatever, new OS (for me), same difference on the updates. When I turned it on, it told me that it was installing updates. This morning, I got up and it had powered off for some reason or another. Last night, I stayed up late programming and left my computer on. So, I didn’t get the audio recorded, and I have something different to talk about, to-boot. I was going to publish the next Chess TDD post today, but I got caught up in the worst kind of yak-shaving where I was basically just trying to get my computer functional again.

Update windows 8 to 8.1