I'm actually now running 8.1. This evening I was looking at stuff on the web when my laptop just shut itself down. When it restarted it went though a series of updates that involved restarting at least six or seven times and messages telling me not to turn my computer off with meaningless progress percentages. Not quite as long as the (announced) upgrade from 8.0 to 8.1 but close. It was about 35 minutes before it finally came up into the desktop I normally use. I was seriously wondering if my computer had been compromised by some kind of nastyware but when I looked at update history I saw a bunch of Windows updates had happened as well as several updates to Office 2010. After all that Windows update still showed two important updates available and six optionals. All of the optionals were updates to hardware drivers so I went ahead and did all of them.
This has happened at least one other time where I could see updates. On a few other occasions my Asus G55V just shut off. There was no indication that it involved an upgrade but maybe it did. It has happened a few times in the year since I bought this computer. I have seen notifications about an update related shutdown going to happen but on this and at least one other occasion there was none.
I always work from the Windows desktop and very seldom see the goofy metro interface or any of the apps on it. I'm wondering if these updates are announced on the metro interface but not on the desktop.
Is anyone else seeing anything like this?