Hanging PC

Glad the rollback worked.

I’ve been using and abusing PC’s since pre-Windows 3.0 days both as a hobby and professionally and I have never had to reinstall the OS and everything else due to some odd behaviour somewhere.

It really is the first resort of tech support people that just can’t be arsed to think a problem through and investigate what is really happening.

Windows is made up of literally thousands of components – when one or two get screwed for whatever reason they can be replaced. Not always trivially, but you don’t need to wipe your disk & start again.

The problem with that approach is that if you never understood the cause of the problem then you cannot be sure you won’t just get it again.

I once had a stand-up argument with a support bloke that was supposed to administer our systems. One of my guys PC’s just showed odd behaviour – forget the details – that was stopping him working properly. Support bloke’s instruction was to “reformat and reinstall” – but for a software developer’s PC with all the tools, environment, etc, let alone things like email, this is a 1-2 day job at least, plus the lost work. He could not explain why this would fix the problem. In his mind it just made it go away so he could go back to browsing the web. It turned out that one file needed fixing – a 60 minute investigation and a 5 minute fix. Grrrr 😡