Something about your Windows 8 install is broken. I believe you said you don't have much on the machine to lose. More likely than not, you have a hidden restore partition on your drive which should enable you to restore your software to the state it was in when you first took it out of the box.
You generally access this partition by hitting a certain key or combination of keys immediately after power on. Sometimes a screen message will tell you what to hit. Other times you need to read the docs that came with the computer or lacking those, check the manufacturers website for info on accessing the restore partition.
Doing a complete factory restore will erase your harddrive (and all your docs/pics/music/etc) and put a clean install of Window 8 back on. At that point, updates will install without issue.
If for some reason your machine doesn't have a hidden restore partition or you can't figure out how to access it, you can skip installing 8.1 and go right to 10. This link provides step by step instructions for doing so.
http://www.howtogeek.com/224342/how-to-c...indows-10/
Like the factory restore option mentioned earlier, doing a clean install of 10 will erase everything on your drive. But it will also give you a known good install of Windows and get rid of any broken aspects which could do something like oh, I dunno, prevent a computer from being able to install updates.
You generally access this partition by hitting a certain key or combination of keys immediately after power on. Sometimes a screen message will tell you what to hit. Other times you need to read the docs that came with the computer or lacking those, check the manufacturers website for info on accessing the restore partition.
Doing a complete factory restore will erase your harddrive (and all your docs/pics/music/etc) and put a clean install of Window 8 back on. At that point, updates will install without issue.
If for some reason your machine doesn't have a hidden restore partition or you can't figure out how to access it, you can skip installing 8.1 and go right to 10. This link provides step by step instructions for doing so.
http://www.howtogeek.com/224342/how-to-c...indows-10/
Like the factory restore option mentioned earlier, doing a clean install of 10 will erase everything on your drive. But it will also give you a known good install of Windows and get rid of any broken aspects which could do something like oh, I dunno, prevent a computer from being able to install updates.
