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.
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?
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.
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