Why Do Windows 8 Updates Always Break My PC?

Back in January 2013 I built myself a gaming PC, running Windows 7, and everything was running perfectly. A few months later I decided to make the upgrade to Windows 8 for the performance benefits and faster boot speeds, and since then I've had to wipe my hard drives 4 times because the OS updates keep messing up my system in some way. This has been happening over the course of a year, and happens every few months or so.

Yesterday (after completing an update when I last switched off the PC), I turned it on and after the Windows loading screen I would just get a black, flickering screen which did nothing, and my desktop would never load. I thought at first it might be a hardware issue, but after plugging in my friend's hard drive which had Windows 7 on it, the computer loaded up fine and everything worked, so it had to be an issue with Windows 8 or my hard drive, likely being Windows 8 as there was an update the last time I turned it off.

After countless hours of trying to sort out the problem, it turned out that it was impossible for me to load safe mode or even the installation disc for Windows 8, in order to access the troubleshooting feature on the disc. My PC despite me setting the BIOS to load from my optical drive first was just loading straight from my hard drive every time, into the broken OS. The only thing that has worked so far is to use a program called 'Darik's Boot and Nuke', a program which I install to a disc and can use to wipe the entire hard drive clean. For some reason I am able to load this from a disc, but not the Windows installation CD. So right now I am erasing everything on my computer (luckily my important college files are backed to a thumb drive), and so I have to reinstall every program and download 400GB worth of games again, all because of another faulty Windows 8 update.

My question is, why does this keep happening? The hardware in my system is all very modern, maintained well and functioning perfectly fine, but Windows keeps messing everything up. I am contemplating switching off all updates in the future, because they seem to be changing settings/files which are creating incompatibilities. I would have thought Microsoft, being leaders in the computing industry, would at least provide customers with safe updates that don't prevent the OS from working. As I said, this is the 4th time this has happened over the course of a year, and every time I have to wipe my entire hard drive and reinstall everything. I'm not sure if these updates are conflicting with hardware drivers on my PC or what.

My PC specs are:

Intel i5 3570k, Asrock Z77 Extreme4 Motherboard, 8GB RAM, Asus GTX 780 GPU, OCZ 650W Modular PSU, single 1TB Seagate SSHD (master), single 1TB Western Digital HDD (slave), Corsair H60 liquid CPU cooler, Windows 8 64bit, LiteOn IHAS123-04 optical drive, dual 1080p monitors.

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