win8.1 Windows 8.1 Support Thread

[DaveGreen93]

Were you trying to upgrade a VL version?  You can upgrade from VL to VL, or retail to retail (via the Store) but not VL to retail (or retail to VL).  I upgraded from 8.0 VL to 8.1 VL; however, I had to download 8.1 VL separately and mount it to do that upgrade.

 

This would be why mine wasn't working. Thank you!

[devnulllore]

Hi,

 

Well I have Windows 8 x64 and qualify for the free upgrade to 8.1 but I can't seem to get a good idea of why to upgrade. Of course I want to keep up to date and all my hardware vendors have 8.1 drivers but is this a recommended update from, YOU, the ones I trust the life of my PC with far more than Microsoft?

 

Thanks,

[pixelpixel]

Anyone got any debug tips for the update ?

 

I have been trying for most of the day and I seem to get different error codes.

 

This must be about my 10th time downloading the update. :angry:

[Shadowbladex]

This is a rather small annoyance, but I wanted to see if anyone else knew the answer. Does it take a certain period of time before apps stop displaying as "NEW"? I did a fresh install of Win8 and then downloaded the 8.1 update, which of course meant reinstalling all of my programs. Now they all seem to say "NEW" on them (except Decor8 oddly enough, which was installed last) 

 

Can you turn this completely off? I generally know when I install a new app LOL  :rofl:

 

[+Red King Subscriber²]

Anyone find IE11 to be significantly slower than IE10? I am typing this on my netbook and IE11 is not keeping up rendering the characters (did reset, no addons, HWA off and on) whereas IE10 had no issues at all.

[burnsflipper]

Does anyone have random connection drops or intermittent connection? I'm using an ethernet connection and from time to time I have to renew the ip and I get a "gateway not available" message, renrewing the ip solves it, but it happens quite often, it happened some times in Windows 8 as well but not as often, I read of people that in 7 they didn't have this issue, is this an OS issue? I'm using the regular Realtek Ethernet plaque

[Robbie Ride]

Anyone with a Ralink RT5390 802.11b/g/n Wifi Adapter installed in their notebooks should avoid installing the Windows 8.1 update. Installing the update will result in no wireless connection and there are no known fixes available.

 

I have been spoke to four Microsoft Support reps regarding this problem with the fourth rep actively researching this issue to try and work out if its a problem with the driver or the operating system once 8.1 has been installed. I will update once I spoken to this rep later today.

 

 

Due to the size of the image please click to more

[Davo]

8.1 has been fine so far for me but IE11 is absolute junk IMO. So many websites are crashing on me that never did in IE10 and prior.

[ViperAFK]

8.1 has been fine so far for me but IE11 is absolute junk IMO. So many websites are crashing on me that never did in IE10 and prior.

If you are having websites randomly locking up and then it says "tab not responding", try uninstalling the ie adblock extension if you are using it, that fixed it for me.  You can also disable "enhanced protected mode" in the advanced preferences which will allow you to keep using adblock without lockups.

[Corvid19]

Plugged my "experimental" Windows 8 drive in to my PC this morning and began update through the store, it ended badly with a corrupt local user account with "file read/write" error messages. Plugged Windows 7 drive back in. Next tried updating my laptop from the preview to 8.1 using a DVD from my Action Pack. Chose to keep my user files. All seemed fine but all of a sudden a message said "restoring previous version of Windows" and that also failed. I'm done

[Fourjays Veteran]

8.1 has been fine so far for me but IE11 is absolute junk IMO. So many websites are crashing on me that never did in IE10 and prior.

 

 

If you are having websites randomly locking up and then it says "tab not responding", try uninstalling the ie adblock extension if you are using it, that fixed it for me.  You can also disable "enhanced protected mode" in the advanced preferences which will allow you to keep using adblock without lockups.

 

I don't have the Adblock extension installed and I keep getting crashes IE11 too (Modern only - desktop is solid as a rock) . I did have AdBlock installed previously, but uninstalled it in favour of the tracking protection lists. Oddly, the problem seems to go away once I've opened up IE on the desktop.

 

Really wish Microsoft would focus on improving more than just IE's rendering engine now (on the desktop that is). At times it makes me feel like IE6 still lurks underneath.

[kde]

Wow its crazy how much trouble everyone is having. I went out that night, got wasted, came home, drunkenly clicked the direct link into windows store, it didn't do anything, fell asleep, woke up with 'you will have to re-install your apps again' or something, clicked ok, fell asleep again, woke up to find windows 8.1 installed.

 

Maybe you guys should all try it while drunk.

[The Norwegian Drone Pilot]

Not sure why Windows 8.1 did this though, but have anyone else seen that when you upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1, then your 'Program Files' (Programfiler in Norwegian) folder gets renamed to 'program files' (programfiler in Norwegian)?

 

This is ofc no big deal as it's just a name on a folder. But i'm just wondering if anyone else have seen this.

 

And i'll guess i have to wait a little time to find a Norwegian Windows 8.1 ISO file to download to?

 

I have a legit Windows 8 key, so i basicly can download the WIndows 8.1 ISO file as Windows 8.1 is free for existing Windows 8 users with a legit serial.

[Janet010]

As I read all these issues, I think I am very lucky. I had no problems whatsoever with updating from Windows 8 pro to Windows 8.1 pro. Installing the RT update took a bit more time and effort, but it works like a charm.

 

For the driver issues: the manufacturers of the components should be addressed, not Microsoft. The OEM version was provided some months ago, so they had time to update their drivers.

[tkaw220]

Anyone got any debug tips for the update ?

 

I have been trying for most of the day and I seem to get different error codes.

 

This must be about my 10th time downloading the update. :angry:

 

I tried to install the upgrade from Store since Friday but still getting error 0xC1900101 - 0x2000C until Sunday night. Give up. Getting a pirated 8.1 DVD to do clean install. Thank you MS.

[Davo]

Your fixes for IE11 worked and thank you. However, considering that it's either ride out with no adblock and use the lress-than-reliable lists or keep the extension and let Active X run wild, at that point I might as well just use another browser.

 

Not really all that jazzed about three start buttons on my taskbar when I didn't want any but atleast they're benign.

[ViperAFK]

Your fixes for IE11 worked and thank you. However, considering that it's either ride out with no adblock and use the lress-than-reliable lists or keep the extension and let Active X run wild, at that point I might as well just use another browser.

 

Not really all that jazzed about three start buttons on my taskbar when I didn't want any but atleast they're benign.

I reported the issue to the adblock developer, they are aware of the issue so hopefully there will be a fix.

 

In regards to the protected mode, the "Enhanced Protected Mode" is actually a new feature added in IE11. If you disable that I think you are still running the regular "protected mode" present in win7 and win8.

[Ian S.]

I think it is just a overload on their servers. I upgraded on the evening of the 17th from RT and it went fine (except that it synced my start screen layout from before I installed the preview) and the fact that it 2 hours.

[Ambroos]

I quite liked 8.1 but had to revert to Windows 7.

 

After a long period of sticking with 7 and not liking 8 (at all) on Friday I decided to try out 8.1. It looked interesting, stuff like StartIsBack was mature and I was just curious to see how it evolved.

So I created a VHD on my regular Windows 7 SSD to try stuff side by side without messing with partitions, unpacked the install.wim using imagex (all really fast and smooth), used EasyBCD to add the VHD to my bootloader and I was running 8.1. So far so good.

 

First things first, installing drivers and laptop-specific utilities. I was surprised to see everything sort of worked fine. I had to enable compatibility mode to get some things to install but in the end everything installed without error. Intel Graphics worked out of the box once I connected to my WiFi (install seemed to have happened in the background while I was surfing the Intel site to download them) and my nVidia stuff worked too after a download of the latest drivers off the site. Pretty cool. Then I noticed I had no brightness control on nVidia graphics so I reverted to the unsigned hybrid drivers for Windows 7 which worked fine including GPU switching. Messed around with Office 2013 some more, tried StartIsBack, some visual styles and concluded I quite liked it. There weren't many improvements for me with how I use Windows, but in general it wasn't worse than 7 (besides some small pet peeves).

 

So I decided to go for it completely (we get tons of free keys through school anyway). Rebooted into 7, deleted the VHD and made an image of my Windows 7 drive on my second HDD just to make sure. Secure erased the drive, installed 8.1 from a stick and installed the usual hybrid drivers again since they worked.

 

At first everything ran quite well, but a few hours in I suddenly had a BSOD. Rebooted, ten minutes later another (exact same message). Couldn't figure out what caused it from the dumps but since it caused my switchable GPU LEDs to blink I concluded that was the problem. Switched back to the regular non-hybrid Intel and nVidia drivers, worked fine. Figured out that I could use the Charm brightness setting instead of my brightness keys on keyboard and that was fine.

 

Until I had to go to my grandparents and put my laptop in standby. On coming back from standby my display was completely unreadable and full of glitches. Had to start a CMD blindly with "shutdown /s /f /t 1" to get my laptop down without causing more problems. On reboot cleaned the drivers, tried an older version I know worked perfectly on 7, suddenly couldn't get any sort of image anymore, just a few 'noise' lines. So uninstalled the drivers in safe mode and installed the signed Hybrid drivers from Sony since someone online reported to have used them without issues in 8. Those just glitched up everything so I decided to screw it and go back to 7.

 

So yeah, an otherwise OK experience ruined by bad graphics drivers. I have to admit this is a very (very) exotic hardware setup (Intel and nVidia Graphics, first gen Hybrid, no Optimus, hardware switch) but I expected much better compatibility with Windows 7 drivers. Boo.

 

Other small bits that annoyed me more after some longer use (2 days):

• Control of wireless networks with that slideout metro thing is just annoying. I want to right-click to configure advanced options or get the status but I can't.
• Dark colors for the desktop VS are unusable thanks to the black title bar text without glow. Fixed with custom VS but still, bad design if you ask me.
• Spotty performance. There were times when I felt my CPU would not ramp up fast enough and everything felt just unresponsive (which never happens on 7).
• Can't enter BIOS on regular shutdown/startup because of the new semi-hibernate default boot process (which wasn't actually faster on my PC but hey).
• Task switchers (Alt+tab and especially winkey+tab) treat the desktop as a complete second-class citizen
• 8 had a limited Metro control panel but you could do everything in the Desktop one. 8.1 has a better Metro CP but some stuff is still in the Desktop one, but some stuff is now only in the Metro one, which forces you to jump between the two.
• Font rendering in Metro. Jesus Christ that stuff is just bad. I'll take regular ClearType over that any day.
• Login screen. Lock screen looks good, but the login is just bland. Plain colour background on a screen with so little content? Stupid designers.
• SkyDrive shoved in your face with no way to disable/remove it (I seriously hope Europe gets on this since it's just going too far).
• Folders that used to be libraries and DLNA/network devices now crowding up the Computer "This PC" list/view.
• New UAC sound.
• Lack of any sort of faster boot on an already fast machine.
• Default system DPI and zoom settings (IE) made everything gigantic* and blurry (much bigger than regular 100% on 7)

Things I liked more than 7:

• Most sounds besides UAC (like the device connection sounds)
• Native fingerprint management (complete instead of using third-party software)
• Better automatic driver installation

So yeah. We're getting there and I would probably have stuck with it if it were stable on my hardware just for the sake of being up-to-date, but it's not a complete improvement over 7 for non-touch users yet if you ask me.

[TAZMINATOR]

I quite liked 8.1 but had to revert to Windows 7.

 

After a long period of sticking with 7 and not liking 8 (at all) on Friday I decided to try out 8.1. It looked interesting, stuff like StartIsBack was mature and I was just curious to see how it evolved.

So I created a VHD on my regular Windows 7 SSD to try stuff side by side without messing with partitions, unpacked the install.wim using imagex (all really fast and smooth), used EasyBCD to add the VHD to my bootloader and I was running 8.1. So far so good.

 

First things first, installing drivers and laptop-specific utilities. I was surprised to see everything sort of worked fine. I had to enable compatibility mode to get some things to install but in the end everything installed without error. Intel Graphics worked out of the box once I connected to my WiFi (install seemed to have happened in the background while I was surfing the Intel site to download them) and my nVidia stuff worked too after a download of the latest drivers off the site. Pretty cool. Then I noticed I had no brightness control on nVidia graphics so I reverted to the unsigned hybrid drivers for Windows 7 which worked fine including GPU switching. Messed around with Office 2013 some more, tried StartIsBack, some visual styles and concluded I quite liked it. There weren't many improvements for me with how I use Windows, but in general it wasn't worse than 7 (besides some small pet peeves).

 

So I decided to go for it completely (we get tons of free keys through school anyway). Rebooted into 7, deleted the VHD and made an image of my Windows 7 drive on my second HDD just to make sure. Secure erased the drive, installed 8.1 from a stick and installed the usual hybrid drivers again since they worked.

 

At first everything ran quite well, but a few hours in I suddenly had a BSOD. Rebooted, ten minutes later another (exact same message). Couldn't figure out what caused it from the dumps but since it caused my switchable GPU LEDs to blink I concluded that was the problem. Switched back to the regular non-hybrid Intel and nVidia drivers, worked fine. Figured out that I could use the Charm brightness setting instead of my brightness keys on keyboard and that was fine.

 

Until I had to go to my grandparents and put my laptop in standby. On coming back from standby my display was completely unreadable and full of glitches. Had to start a CMD blindly with "shutdown /s /f /t 1" to get my laptop down without causing more problems. On reboot cleaned the drivers, tried an older version I know worked perfectly on 7, suddenly couldn't get any sort of image anymore, just a few 'noise' lines. So uninstalled the drivers in safe mode and installed the signed Hybrid drivers from Sony since someone online reported to have used them without issues in 8. Those just glitched up everything so I decided to screw it and go back to 7.

 

So yeah, an otherwise OK experience ruined by bad graphics drivers. I have to admit this is a very (very) exotic hardware setup (Intel and nVidia Graphics, first gen Hybrid, no Optimus, hardware switch) but I expected much better compatibility with Windows 7 drivers. Boo.

 

Other small bits that annoyed me more after some longer use (2 days):

• Control of wireless networks with that slideout metro thing is just annoying. I want to right-click to configure advanced options or get the status but I can't.
• Dark colors for the desktop VS are unusable thanks to the black title bar text without glow. Fixed with custom VS but still, bad design if you ask me.
• Spotty performance. There were times when I felt my CPU would not ramp up fast enough and everything felt just unresponsive (which never happens on 7).
• Can't enter BIOS on regular shutdown/startup because of the new semi-hibernate default boot process (which wasn't actually faster on my PC but hey).
• Task switchers (Alt+tab and especially winkey+tab) treat the desktop as a complete second-class citizen
• 8 had a limited Metro control panel but you could do everything in the Desktop one. 8.1 has a better Metro CP but some stuff is still in the Desktop one, but some stuff is now only in the Metro one, which forces you to jump between the two.
• Font rendering in Metro. Jesus Christ that stuff is just bad. I'll take regular ClearType over that any day.
• Login screen. Lock screen looks good, but the login is just bland. Plain colour background on a screen with so little content? Stupid designers.
• SkyDrive shoved in your face with no way to disable/remove it (I seriously hope Europe gets on this since it's just going too far).
• Folders that used to be libraries and DLNA/network devices now crowding up the Computer "This PC" list/view.
• New UAC sound.
• Lack of any sort of faster boot on an already fast machine.
• Default system DPI and zoom settings (IE) made everything gigantic* and blurry (much bigger than regular 100% on 7)

Things I liked more than 7:

• Most sounds besides UAC (like the device connection sounds)
• Native fingerprint management (complete instead of using third-party software)
• Better automatic driver installation

So yeah. We're getting there and I would probably have stuck with it if it were stable on my hardware just for the sake of being up-to-date, but it's not a complete improvement over 7 for non-touch users yet if you ask me.

 

You don't have to worry about it... Windows 7 support will last to the year of 2020. You have plenty of time to play on Windows 7. And maybe Windows 9 may be better or you could move to other OS such as Linux or OS X

[Ambroos]

You don't have to worry about it... Windows 7 support will last to the year of 2020. You have plenty of time to play on Windows 7. And maybe Windows 9 may be better or you could move to other OS such as Linux or OS X

 

True, but not having the latest software really makes my brain itch :P I have to have everything up-to-date and it really annoys me when I can't. For Windows 8/8.1 that's hardware issues, for Office 2013 it's the horrible font rendering that bugs me.

[Fredrik Wallentin]

Okay i got this wierd problem after upgraded to Windows 8.1

 

My apps doesnt shut down when i drag them down. they are still runing in the background. its damn annoying

 

How do i fix this ?

[Fourjays Veteran]

In regards to the protected mode, the "Enhanced Protected Mode" is actually a new feature added in IE11. If you disable that I think you are still running the regular "protected mode" present in win7 and win8.

If that is a case I'll give that a go and see if it fixes my issues with the Modern UI IE11. Desktop IE11 is solid as a rock, but the Modern IE11 is crashing a LOT for me. Just crashed writing this message... Got all add-ons disabled (although they don't even run in the Modern one afaik) and can't think of much else to try. :/

[Guest]

Am I right in thinking that Microsoft only took down the update for windows RT?

 

I ask because I'm not being offered to upgrade to 8.1 pro in the windows store, even though I have the necessary windows update to allow this and I've even tried clearing the store cache.

 

Any ideas?

[Espada04]

I got 8.1 successfully updated.  Though I've noticed two issues on it so far.

 

First issue I noticed is the computer would randomly semi freeze. I can still sorta interact with the screen. like bring up the side menu. but opening apps, minimizing, trying to open up task manager doesn't work. I'd have to force shutdown and restart the computer again for the problem to be fixed. This occurs randomly

 

Second issue is windows updates.  It sees 3 important updates available, at the same time when you try to install them it tells you they're not needed. LOL so they're listed as importantbut you don't need them. Kind of confusing. One of them is listed as System Hardware update for Windows 8.1 so I was assuming that update can resolve the issue I'm having. 

 

P.S This issue is happening on the Surface Pro.  I'm not sure if it's related to the RT issue.