As someone who has hundreds of installed programs with tweaks on top of tweaks and hundreds of thousands of files, I always find the suggestion to “just reinstall” beyond laughable.
Windows recovery fails in plenty of circumstances, it’s not a magic bullet. Snapshots are like you can do with btrfs, but that’s not exactly how Windows recovery works.
Sure if it fails completely it will, but it doesn’t catch everything. Here’s a related story I have:
At work we had a bunch of Lenovo X1 Carbons running windows that would have the usb-c ports die seemingly randomly on users which was a big problem since that’s also the charging port. There never seemed to be any similar root cause connecting the incidents and Lenovo’s support wasn’t any help. Our entire company is remote but luckily we had onsite support so for a while they would just come by and replace the whole motherboard each time.
Finally one day while scheduling a repair the support guy I was talking to just said, “Oh I’ve seen this before. It’s just a bad update and resetting the CMOS battery by putting a paper clip in this hidden hole fixes it.” We had the user try it out and the ports worked fine again. Apparently they had run some windows updates that failed silently and were causing the hardware issues.
From then on any time a user has had a hardware issue we can’t figure out we just have them try the reset and it has worked every time. This only happens probably 3-4 times a year but we only have less than 40 of these machines so not an insignificant amount.
… No you just use Windows built-in rollback feature. Which I think even auto-recovers these days of it detects a failure to boot after an update.
Hah! Can someone here chime in and tell me when the slow AF (as in, it can take hours) rollback feature actually worked‽
Who TF is that patient‽ You can reinstall Windows and all your apps in half the time required.
As someone who has hundreds of installed programs with tweaks on top of tweaks and hundreds of thousands of files, I always find the suggestion to “just reinstall” beyond laughable.
Windows recovery fails in plenty of circumstances, it’s not a magic bullet. Snapshots are like you can do with btrfs, but that’s not exactly how Windows recovery works.
Sure if it fails completely it will, but it doesn’t catch everything. Here’s a related story I have:
At work we had a bunch of Lenovo X1 Carbons running windows that would have the usb-c ports die seemingly randomly on users which was a big problem since that’s also the charging port. There never seemed to be any similar root cause connecting the incidents and Lenovo’s support wasn’t any help. Our entire company is remote but luckily we had onsite support so for a while they would just come by and replace the whole motherboard each time.
Finally one day while scheduling a repair the support guy I was talking to just said, “Oh I’ve seen this before. It’s just a bad update and resetting the CMOS battery by putting a paper clip in this hidden hole fixes it.” We had the user try it out and the ports worked fine again. Apparently they had run some windows updates that failed silently and were causing the hardware issues.
From then on any time a user has had a hardware issue we can’t figure out we just have them try the reset and it has worked every time. This only happens probably 3-4 times a year but we only have less than 40 of these machines so not an insignificant amount.