Yeah they are dying, that's why there is a new record of 7.5 mill concurrent users on steam and 25+ million active accounts. That's just steam as it grows. More larger than xbox live for example. In fact more have jumped to PC since 360\wii\ps3 gen ended. Now if you said retail rather than...
By the looks of that it was straight after W8 came out. It wouldn't have most optimized drivers and updates at that point in October. That would be my question towards this. Either way, it probably wouldn't be big difference.
I would look myself but since the update it broke and the troubleshooter claims driver may be out of date when it's continually being updated as they come out.
Just for anyone with same problem. It was an error with the display drivers from AMD with my card for the apps. Wait for driver updates, in which there is one right now but I haven't installed yet. I know from the app troubleshooter.
I installed them fine. But my apps and start button broke after returning from start up. Apps start then exit to desktop while anything from the start button claims it couldn't find the file. I'm unsure if the updates did this or it's just a 8.1 bug with the OS but it seems likely.
Eh, this isn't the first time Mircsoft has had failing updates espcially in a preview\RTM version. Although embarrassing that's it's happening in multiple other OS's.