I'm not in Windows 8 so often (except for the past two days) that on the rare occasions when I do load it up I am at all happy to wait a half-hour or more for the machine to shut down because it's downloading and installing dozens of updates.

I turned automatic updates off. When I have time, I'll boot into Windows 8 and do the updates manually.

In an attempt to get a handle on Windows 8 performance on this hardware, I installed SpeedFan 4.49.

Quick tip. Avoid crapware and get the download here.

SpeedFan isn't pretty, but it works well. I can monitor CPU, GPU and disk temperatures. It also keeps an eye on GPU voltage, CPU frequency, battery charge state, uptime and CPU load.

SpeedFan can also manually adjust your fan speeds. I'm not interested in that so much, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

In case you're wondering, Windows 8 doesn't run any cooler on this HP Pavilion g6 than Fedora 20 with either the proprietary Catalyst driver or the open Radeon driver with Radeon DPM activated.

(I used a digital camera to capture the screen images of my Windows boot failure and subsequent 8.1 upgrade failure so you can share in my pain before reading below how I fixed what Microsoft broke)

So I figured I'd upgrade the Windows 8 portion of my Windows/Fedora dual-booting (and naturally EFI-running) system to the presumably shinier, newer Windows 8.1 with the offer of an upgrade via the Microsoft Store.

Big fucking mistake.

I go into Windows 8 and do the upgrade. It tells me at some point that "there will be several reboots."

The first reboot was the last. Windows would no longer boot. (Luckily Fedora continued to boot during this whole nightmare.) When I tried to start Windows 8, I got a blue-screen error with the code 0xc000000f.

I went into Recovery Mode via the BIOS.

The automatic repair didn't work. Then I went to Advanced Options, then to the Windows command prompt, to start trying hacks.

The easy hacks didn't work.

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