Windows 8.1

closeHey, just so you know ... this post is now about 10 years and 2 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Windows 8.1 has been out since last October and while I had upgraded my desktop PC at work and my Surface Pro tablet almost immediately, I had never gotten around to installing the update on my daughter’s laptop. It was time to give her the Start button back! 😀 As seems to the norm for me, the upgrade was not exactly smooth.

Ready to go, I opened the Windows Store app and clicked the “Download” button on the Windows 8.1 update tile.  The process started, and then a few minutes later gave me a nice generic “Something happened and the install of Windows 8.1 can’t be completed” message. Tried again … same thing. Luckily this turned out to be an easy fix, as I found this article. After following the instructions, the download proceeded successfully and the upgrade continued. It was going to take a while, so I let it go overnight.

The next morning, I found the laptop still humming away (at least, the fan was on) but the screen was black. No mouse cursor, no response to Ctl-Alt-Del, nothing. I hard powered down the laptop and rebooted it. The hp BIOS logo went by, then the Windows 8 flag logo … then the screen went black again. WTF?

How did we ever troubleshoot these kinds of problems before the internet and Google? (I probably would have had to dial into a few BBSes and post on the message boards and hope for a response ;-)). I found lots of reports of the “black screen of nothingness” after the Windows 8.1 upgrade. First, I tried the recovery disk method, as some people reported a problem with a corrupted MBR after the update. That seemed to work initially, as I was then able to log into the laptop and see Windows 8.1 running, but after another reboot, the black screen again.

I finally tracked it down to the Intel graphics card in the laptop, based on a thread on the Microsoft TechNet support forums. Rather than try to get the Intel drivers working, I just disabled the device completely in device manager, leaving the laptop to use the AMD Radeon Mobility graphics adapter instead. Rebooted and, wallah! No black screen.

After that, the only minor problem I had was that the laptop lost the ability to scan over the network. I tried manually adding the exceptions to the Windows Firewall again but could not get it working so I just re-installed the software completely and that fixed the problem. I don’t even think my daughter noticed the upgrade … at least, it’s been a week and she hasn’t commented on it yet. Although I guess that’s good since it means she’s not having any new problems either.

Coming up next: Windows 8.1 Update 1 in March (and the return of the Start Menu?).

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