I was recently given a Toshiba laptop that was ill.  The owner reported it was horribly slow and would crash fairly often, and would take hours to power off or boot up.  I took the laptop and found that it was failing to upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1.

I was it booted up long enough to create the Toshiba Recovery Discs.  I backed the personal data and proceeded to do a factory restore, which included formatting the hard drive.  As usual the restore disks from OEMs load up the laptop with lots of crap.  There was no Install Key sticker anywhere on the laptop so I did use a Key Extractor just to be safe.  I decided to try out the Windows 8 / 8.1 Media Creator straight from Microsoft.

To my surprise it worked beautifully.  I was able to create a USB bootable device with 8.1 (None of this upgrade crap) and Windows even activated during the process.  Must be one of those BIOS ‘features’ now.  I did have a backup of the CD Key prior to formatting the hard drive, though.

There were only two unknown devices listed in System, which will be remedied with those two drivers from Toshiba’s support site.

Use the link above, click Create Media. It’s awesome. Probably the only awesome thing about Windows 8 I can think of at the moment.