I am not a computer super user but I have served movies to my xbox 360's ,I run a bunch of different bluray software and have a dozen devices on my network with zero issues. The only thing I have done is added a program called Start8 and run desktop mode and it looks like im on win7. I find the network portion a little less friendly than in Win7 but 8.1 is quite stable and solid for me.
For anyone interested in a clean install the upgrade needs to be done first before the clean install so as to register your hardware with MS.
this
article explains it.
