Windows 8.1 update then system refresh and the problems

Dear Readers,
Microsoft released it's windows 8.1 update after almost one year in the making. The update was pretty timely kudos to Microsoft for that. I live in San Francisco which meant that the update would reach me at 4am PST, my local time. Being the gadget freak I'm, I could not sleep and started updating my laptop as soon as I saw the update in the store.

I have a Samsung Ativ book 6. Now the update itself was pretty seemless. The download was 3.6 GB that did not take as long as update process. Anyhow bring the gadget freak I'm,  I wanted to make sure the drivers were installed correctly. The Ativ book comes with something known as SW update, which is Samsung's driver and other software update program. This program started behaving crazy. I had to go through the whole process of searching and finding my model number and then downloaded all the drivers etc which was additional 4+ GB. Now when I installed the catalyst driver for my graphics card and Elan driver for my input devices the laptop needed a restart which I did and after this the laptop screen just went black.. it would not boot anymore.

I tried various things and then finally using the soft reset( long press power button) when the laptop restarted I pressed shift+ kept tapping F8 key which took me to recovery. Since I did not want to lose any of my data I chose to refresh the PC. These steps made my OS go back to Windows 8. Not only it went back to windows 8 it went to the same state in which I purchased it.  The recovery from Microsoft works really well. Now I wanted to get back to windows 8.1 and my store was not showing the update anymore.  I also tried to run (windows +R and type ) ms-windows-store:Windows Upgrade. No success.  Went to Microsoft website and tried to upgrade from there still nothing.

Then I used a feature that comes with Samsung laptop for technical assistance S chat or something. The guy was rude and made no attempts to make me feel comfortable I told him the whole story I have written above. He told me that if I want to get that update for windows 8.1 in my store, I need to do a complete recovery and not a refresh. I told him I don't want to lose my data he said " I'm sorry back up your data on an external hard disk as this is the only way. " I thought, it can't be so I started installing all my apps from the store.  Go to store swipe the screen from top or right click mouse select your apps, again do the swipe or right click>>select all>>install.  Then I went to charms bar >>settings>>change PC settings >>checked for updates and installed all the updates... one can use control panel>> system settings >> for checking the updates too. After I installed all the updates the option to update to Windows 8.1 started showing in my store.

So why did I write this blog.  Well it's because there is limited information available about the update and the problems like refresh option from recovery and to tell you don't let any stupid customer technical support guy with no knowledge (in my case Samsung technical support).. that wiping your PC is the only option.. if update to Windows 8.1 is not showing in your store make sure you have windows updates installed.

Vaibhav Brajesh