Thursday, February 12, 2015

Windows Craziness

Excuse me while I rant about computers.

A Windows 7 pc had some kind of overnight update, maybe this one?, and wouldn't reboot in the morning.

The pc didn't present Safe Mode as an option, but did offer the services of Windows Startup Repair, which looked pretty fancy, but which did not work. Even when Startup Repair tried to do a restore from the last good install, it would not work. And it couldn't diagnose what was wrong either.

So I looked up how to force it to go into Safe Mode - hold down the F8 key - and it booted right up into Safe Mode, and then when it was rebooted it was fine. It's running fine now. Somehow booting in Safe Mode just fixed it.

Now, booting into Safe Mode often does "just fix boot problems somehow". It always has. It's a standard behavior for the operating system. Indeed, that's why I tried it.

But I was really stunned that Safe Mode, on its own, did a better job than "Startup Repair". Why didn't they just build a "Safe Mode Reboot" into "Startup Repair"?

I'm sure there's a logical explanation
but it runs counter to expectation.

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