[I guess I&#x27;ll chat up Microsoft on the computer]<p>[SWEET MOTHER OF JESUS]: One of the updates was for the NVidia card. Now my screens are blank. No idea what is going on, since I can&#x27;t see the chat application.<p>[Live update] More optional updates. Hour mark 3 today.<p>[Live update] Looks like Skype is one of the required optional updates. Now we&#x27;re checking for more updates.<p>[Live update] Twenty minutes and the optional updates have completed downloading. Is hoping a technical approach?<p>[Live update] Apparently there are &quot;optional updates&quot; that needed to be installed. Their download has been stalled at 97% for fifteen minutes.<p>I probably should mention here that the machine also has two monitors. When the tech opens a new tool. Sometimes it shows up on the other monitor. Then I have to move it.<p>The techs also like to open Windows update in full screen. This obscures the chat dialog.<p>[Live update] New tech is running upgrade via windows update. Another 2.8 gigs. Almost three hours today. Five or six hours overall.<p>[Live update] Something else didn&#x27;t work. Required reboot. Now with a different tech...or maybe it&#x27;s the first.<p>[Live update] The second pass at installation failed with the same error code. The tech is going to try something else.<p>---<p>The Black Beast is a Dell Precision T7400 with 2x E5405&#x27;s and four hard disks [0] It boots via Grub2 [1]. For Windows, it then boots to the Windows Bootloader and to Windows 8.1 or XP Professional x64 [2]. I&#x27;m upgrading as I type this on my laptop, for some definition of &quot;upgrading&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve been fooling with the upgrade off and on since Sunday. Right now, Microsoft is remoted in and rerunning the update...something I&#x27;ve done more than half a dozen times already. They did some mild Powershell fu first.<p>And it failed with the helpful 80070002 &quot;Windows Update ran into a problem&quot;. Now the tech has restarted the install...it&#x27;s 2.8 gigs of download every time because the installer doesn&#x27;t cache the files.<p>I will say that Microsoft is trying. We&#x27;re already into an hour and a half of tech support today plus a half an hour or so yesterday. And that machine is certainly a corner case.<p>[0]: Two are hardware mirrored via the motherboard.<p>[1]: There&#x27;s Ubuntu Studio 15.04 and CentOS 6 on their own partitions.<p>[2]: The Windows 8.1 was an upgrade over an existing 8.0 upgrade to OEM Windows 7.