Frustrating discovery....

I made an unpleasant discovery today. Something went wrong with the automatic updates feature in Windows 8, and the troubleshooter said that it was because some of its components were configured incorrectly, and it referred me to an on-line tool to magically repair all that at the click of a mouse.

There's not just one of those, but a couple. They have rave reviews, and they look cute, but after running them, my windows updates still come up with a red warning and an error code, and no goddamned updates. I even tried reinstalling Windows, and guess what? That didn't fix the problem either!

In older versions of Windows, when you put the CD into the drive and started it,
you were invited to choose whether you wanted to do a repair of the operating system or not. Windows 8 is too modern and simplified for that. You don't get a
chance to fix the damned thing, except by re-installing it, and now I find that doesn't do it either, and I have no idea why not. The whole purpose of having a CD handy is defeated if it can't renew and replace corrupted or missing files.

After I'd waited for about fifty minutes while Windows 8 was theoretically re-installed, I looked again in Services for the listing of Windows Update, and it wasn't there!  I even went into the Registry of Windows 7 and copied the portion for 'wuauserv' which is the whole works for automatic updates, and then
I copied that into the Registry of Windows 8, it being based on Windows 7, and
that got the Windows Update entry replaced in Services, but it still doesn't fix the failure to update or search for updates.

I'm very close to throwing out Windows 8 and replacing it on that partition of the drive with a fresh copy of PC-BSD, which is an open-source freebie operating system based on Linux, and it both looks good and works. Its GUI is a lot like a cross between Windows and a Mac, and it comes with a good selection of its own programs for just about anything you could want. So I'm asking myself why I'm getting frustrated trying to get Windows 8 working when
I could be using something else that actually works without a lot of cussing.

Windows 8 doesn't seem ready for prime time just yet, in spite of all the hype.
Windows 7 still runs rings around it.  Microsoft is aware of the problems many of us are having with its automatic updates, and it hasn't offered any useful fixes yet which can actually cure the problems. They could make something which could re-install those components, but they haven't. I don't know why not. Nor do I understand why re-installing the operating system didn't fix it.