Yeah, basically that. I’m back at work in Windows land on a Monday morning, and pondering what sadist at Microsoft included these features. It’s not hyperbole to say that the startup repair, and the troubleshooters in settings, have never fixed an issue I’ve encountered with Windows. Not even once. Is this typical?
ETA: I’ve learned from reading the responses that the Windows troubleshooters primarily look for missing or broken drivers, and sometimes fix things just by restarting a service, so they’re useful if you have troublesome hardware.
Yeah, on Win98 (or maybe Win2k), it would always find this obscure sound card driver for this crappy sound card in this Packard Bell I had. Amazing.
But not once ever for any other issue before or since.
The troubleshooter was legitimately good in Win2k. And has sucked since they unified kernels.
Yes it has.
I used to have a sound issue and the repair wizard would always fix it. It would happen again, I think after the next reboot.
I feel like I’ve seen a unicorn!
Sounds a bit like the repair tool broke the sound everytime itself you shut down to polish its image
Possible! I have also used it when I disabled my network and it was quicker to run the repair tool than it was too try and remember what exactly i had done to disable it.
the troubleshooter is great! – “problem not found” – it’s exactly the same problem you couldn’t find yesterday, or the day before, or the day before …
(I think I just keep clicking it out of a sense of ritual – it fixed itself once, so I keep doing the same unrelated set of steps in the same order in some forlorn hope of appeasing the Windows daemons)
I once had the troubleshooter fix a networking issue I had. I’m still shook.
Troubleshooter maybe once, but otherwise no.
Startup repair yes though, after doing the right set of SFC scan and updating Windows cache whatever thing
Yes – frequently, but this is a bad thing.
The issue was that their automatic updater makes my computer unable to boot, due to some compatibility problem with an update. Which it keeps trying to apply. Then every time it fails, startup repair or some troubleshooter rolls back the update and it works again for a while.
Since I cannot turn off updates, it’s stuck in this loop forever. However, I can turn off my computer via the power button (sending shutdown signal, not hard power off), and this avoids applying the update most of the time.
This is an older computer that is only used for games, and a slicer for my 3D printer. I’ve decided to leave it in this state – at this point it’s more a piece of performance art than a reliable computer. I moved my business and my clients away from MS a few years back.
This cost me a lot of easy money though – there’s no maintenance work for me to do and I’ve had to move on to more productive things.
Why didn’t you just disable updates?
Haven’t found an option that does this with any degree of permanence. Always re-enables updates after a short time without prompting. Then reminds me every 3 days to set up a MS account.
Not very concerned – it’s not worth my time to fix. I don’t have free time.
You can disable the updates service and/or edit the registry
This guy thinks you can do what you want with Windows.
Disabling updates is such a ridiculous thing because sometimes it works, and sometimes Windows just ignores you.
I’ve literally had two exact model laptops running as local render servers, fully updated, then disabled updates/reboots on both, around a month later one updated and rebooted dumping my workload and corrupting my database. Disabling anything on Windows doesn’t always work, it does what it wants.
Definitely, it is the first thing I always run. It is really great at checking all the “obvious” user errors like having no internet connection or having a full disk drive.
I can run it and go do something else.
It is also great to explain how to use it over a phone to people who aren’t tech savvy.
Afterwards it gives you extra information about the issue if you click on details.
It is also great to explain how to use it over a phone to people who aren’t tech savvy.
Ive never seen it solve anything and Ive certainly never heard of someone non-savvy being successful with it, even when Ive prompted them to do it (I have them do it because it gives them a few min to calm down)
Afterwards it gives you extra information about the issue if you click on details.
Can you give one example of it giving correct and relevant information there? I have never seen it once.
Well, this is very specific, but the Windows 3D Builder repair tool is probably the best error fixer for 3D printing I have encountered, so at least they got that one right… I couldn’t believe it when I saw it actually worked as intended lol
I often use the network troubleshooter because I know that all that is needed is to turn the adapter off and on, which the troubleshooter will always do, saving me a couple of clicks to do it myself 🤷
I’ve never needed the startup repair, but the troubleshooter does occasionally fix network or audio related things. I don’t do enough to need it very often anymore.
I’ve used startup repair many, many times to repair systems. The troubleshooters have never worked for me, no matter how minor the issue that needed to be fixed.
No, but you have to think that if they had an automated fix for a problem, they’d probably run it in the background before you even realised you had a problem.
Like if I have an network issue, they’d probably retry connecting immediately, rather than waiting for me to hit a Connect button like some caveman with a 56k dialup modem.
Like just cloning a drive and swapping your boot device, internally it’s probably freaking the fuck out about why it’s on NVME2 instead of SATA5 all of a sudden, but it just gets on with it.
On windows 8 the network troubleshooter would restart my wifi driver and that usually fixed the problem. Aside from that nah
I had a problem once when my laptop display was just black after booting. Triend everything, nothing worked. Return to OEM authorized support. They had my laptop for 4 weeks, so solution. Then just refunded the full price & retuned back the laptop.
Ubuntu LTS since then & no sick or weird issues since.
The Windows network troubleshooter is black magic from the depths of hell itself and is very opinionated and selective in choosing which issues to fix and whether you’ll need to bargain your soul to recieve said fix. I have red hair and find it doesn’t bother bartering with me, but your mileage may vary.
It fixed an issue for me once back on like Windows Vista I think.