I know the feeling, bought an 8.0 box for my son, took 10 hours to get it upgraded to 8.1 because the windows update just failed in a state that would not let it update, and without the updates would not let it upgrade to 8.1... I knew I would have to upgrade it when I got it, and knew it would take a few hours, but spending 10 hours on it, reading through blogs and support postings just to get the damned windows update working again....
Yea, this is just one of the many many reasons Windows is losing market share.... and deservedly so.
I had the same problem with this thing. It kept telling me that I needed to install all updates to be able to upgrade to Windows 8.1 but I got error messages when I “checked for updates”. I did notice a little message at the bottom of the window saying it would update again on its own in 2 days.
Then I was finally able to install 8.1, took a good while for that too. Download, install, configure and setting it up...