Windows Warrior...

The new PC operating system, Microsoft’s Windows 10, was officially launched on 29 July. Since I was keen to try it out, I loaded it on my desktop on 1^st August, three days later (and on my birthday). 

All went well for just over a week. There are enough bells and whistles on Windows 10 to satisfy the most determined technophile. Edge, the new browser, is lean, mean and a delight to use.

However...yesterday, on switching on, I found a warning message: 'CRITICAL ERROR - Your Start menu is not working. We'll try and fix it the next time you sign in.' It asks you to click on the 'Sign out Now' button.

So I clicked it and switched the PC off and then on several times - but with absolutely no effect.

Mmmh...a quick check on the internet showed that this ‘critical problem’ was being experienced by quite a few people and someone believed a Microsoft person had committed to come up with a fix.

In the meantime, I scoured the internet for possible solutions and applied various suggested remedies - mostly deleting suspect programs and applying scripts to the command line; nothing worked...nada, niet, zilch.

By the way, although this was described as a ‘critical error’ it only affected a few facilities, like the Start button (but the right-click button still worked), Search, app tiles and the Edge browser (but I could use my old, buggy, Internet Explorer and my Google Chrome browsers to access the internet).

So, in summary, it was far from being a disaster. So, why was I so irritated and why did I not wait until Microsoft came up with a ‘fix’ ?

Good question. The answer is probably because I saw ‘curing’ it as a challenge and also because I’m naturally rather impatient...

The next step was to re-install Windows 10, which took 2-3 hours. This had no effect, the ‘Critical Error’ message glowed even brighter.

At this stage I was losing faith in Windows 10 and decided to re-install Windows 8.1. On attempting, I found that it was impossible as ‘some files required for the installation have been removed.’

Gulp...

But then I had a brain-wave. The most recent restore-point was a couple of days ago – possibly when I had downloaded the item that caused the malfunction. So, I then attempted to roll-back to the earlier point, a few days previously.

...AND IT WORKED. The critical error message disappeared and the beautiful Windows 10 was re-born. However, I did lose some applications including Adobe Creative Cloud with Photoshop and Lightroom, which had to be re-installed.

So, the moral is, if you are a Windows Pioneer, like me, be prepared to take some knocks in the early days. (My sons are less charitable in their assessment; the elder one thinks that anyone who installs new software immediately it comes out, without waiting for one month or more in order for it to bed down is simply asking for trouble; younger son was more succinct – you’re an idiot, Dad!).