You call yourself a novice and perform actions like that? Oo I hope you don't immediately grab a scalpel whenever one of your relatives or friends feels sick. oO
Seriously, there seems to be a couple of things messed up in your Windows installation. The best thing to do is to refresh it. There's no installation disk or anything needed to perform that, as Windows 8.1 - just like Windows 7 - comes with a recovery partition which is used to recover the system.
Follow these steps here to refresh your Windows insallation:
How to refresh, reset, or restore your PC - Windows Help