Well, I'm officially running Windows 8.1 (at least on the desktop)

Which seems much faster, thankfully, and everything appears to be working correctly. The download took a long time, and in fact after an hour or two I was at 27% so I just went on to bed about 10 pm, got up at 1:45 am, and there was a terms of service screen ready, and after that it was less than five minutes and I was up and running. I still need to do it for the laptop; I had some major updates to do (I'm not on the laptop every day, so they piled up), and I'm having trouble getting the Windows 8.1 to come up in the store for it. I'm restarting again to see if it'll come up. That seems to have done it, and I'm trying to download the update as of now, although it glitched a bit at the beginning. So I'll let that download for awhile and get some sleep, then get up early and finish it. Ah, fun. :) If you're trying to download the Windows 8.1 update, I suggest 1) run Windows Update first and get all the normal updates out of the way and 2) restart a time or two if needed afterwards and it should show up. If it tells you that something went wrong with the download, just hit try again. That seemed to work for me on the laptop. Good luck.