I upgraded to 8.1 yesterday on a home-built AsRock Extreme 4 with i7-3770 with 16 GB RAM and OCZ Vertex 4 SSD. Whole process took 10 minutes and performed perf

I upgraded to 8.1 yesterday on a home-built AsRock Extreme 4 with i7-3770 with 16 GB RAM and OCZ Vertex 4 SSD. Whole process took 10 minutes and performed perfectly. Sorry you had an issue, but wanted to point out that it is working smoothly for many people.