I want to share my experience in case it helps somebody else. I have a Lenovo G500 laptop and I did a restore from the restore partition due to some problems. I tried to update Windows, it did it's job, it started configuring the updates and at 98% it displayed the dreadful message "Failure configuring Windows update etc.". The same thing happened 4 times, I even contacted Lenovo (the 1 year warranty was still void) and they said they would send a courier to collect my PC. Fortunately I was able to find the cause of the problem before this (and saved the repair time at least - would they find it, I wonder). The answer was in the C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER folder (WER = Windows Error Reporting). What had happened is that I changed the Secure Boot status/mode in the BIOS from Disabled/Custom/Setup mode to Enabled/Standard/User mode and Windows 8 couldn't update the Secure Boot firmware! I had just forgotten about it (what harm could this change probably do? - I did it because I didn't like the Secure Boot status being reported as disabled even if Secure Boot was enabled - my bad!). This thing almost drove me crazy, if somebody else has the same problem at the end of the Windows updates configuration he/she may have a look at the BIOS...