Whenever someone tells me that they are having a problem with a computer, it is almost always a Dell. If you got to a clean Win 8.0 install, then upgrade again to Win 8.1 and install all of your software. Once you get this working again, get yourself a portable USB hard drive and good backup software like Acronis True Image. Make regular full or incremental backups of all of your hard drives (if you have more than one) and then you will never have this problem again. You just boot to the restore DVD that you create - no need for Windows - with the USB drive connected and restore your hard drive to the most recent backup.
