Using OMR Remark on a surface Pro

I have a new aim - a one day turn around of multi-choice tests to a class of 1000+ students.
If I hadn't had so many software install issues I think I could have managed a sub 24 hour turn around time, as it was I managed 28 hours.

My solution of choice was OMR Remark which is pricey (nearly 2K for a license) but very slick at optical scanning of custom "Shade in the bubbles" type answer sheets.  It took me 30 minutes to scan 1000 scripts with a high speed scanner and then another 90 minutes to clean the scripts (sometimes the optical character recognition can't tell what's been scanned but you can click on a problem sell and see the raw scan of the script, which is usually enough to figure out using the good 'old mark 1 eyeball).

I trialed this approach last year and there was a bit of a learning curve but I figured second time around things would be smoother.  Once the software was installed this was true however installing OMR Remark was an absolute mission which took me two days to sort out.

The problem was OMR Remark depends on something called the .NET 3.5 Framework, which isn't installed on Windows 10 by default.  In theory it should only take a couple of minutes to install but in practice every time I tried to enable the .NET 3.5 Framework I ran into a windows update error (enabling the framework requires windows update to download some files).

After a long day fixing my windows update problems (it turned out my windows updates were indeed screwy) I finally was getting updates coming through for everything EXCEPT when I tried enabling the .NET 3.5 Framework.

Much trolling of forums later I discovered a last ditch possible solution by way of doing an offline install of the .NET 3.5 Framework.  Fortunately this solved my .NET 3.5 Framwork woes and meant I could finally install and RUN my copy of OMR Remark.

If you ever faced with the same problem, the trick was to first create a Windows USB install media:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

I could then install .NET 3.5 using the instructions here:
http://winaero.com/blog/offline-install-of-net-framework-3-5-in-windows-10-using-dism/

Back to Windows 8.1 and how to update when your system doesn't want to.

Sadly my trusty surface pro 3 developed a hardware issue with the Wifi/bluetooth chip.  I had to return it and after a month wait received my replacement.  Unfortunately the replacement machine only had Windows 8.1 on it (rather than Windows 10 which is what the machine I had returned was running).  Even worse, when I went to check for windows updates, the system wouldn't find any, just checking forever with no progress.

I tried the usual fixes, including using the windows troubleshooter, a refresh and even a couple of clean re-installs, all with no joy.

The solution that finally worked was to manually install an update (which deals with fixing update issues).  Here is a link on the update:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3112336/windows-update-client-for-windows-8.1-and-windows-server-2012-r2-december-2015

Once I had installed this update and restarted checking for updates finally worked (it found 183 critical updates!)  

The happy end to the story is that I got in touch with microsoft help and they were able to install windows 10 on my machine, so I finally have an up to date working OS, just in time for the start of semester.