with computers and related devices, sometimes this can actually work. It doesn’t change what caused the problem, but a reboot can produce a fresh system state, in which the inexplicably produced anomaly has not occurred, and there is no guarantee that it will or won’t occur again.

Sometimes you can’t fix what produces the anomaly, but you also don’t want that anomaly present in normal operation conditions, so the first thing you should try is a reset. Maybe the problem won’t happen again, or, quite likely, “user error,” or perhaps choice of added programs, is the source of the anomaly. Chances are, if you continue the same patterns and activities as before the reset, you will encounter the problem again, repeatedly, requiring frequent reboots, in order to obtain a non-compromised computing environment.

But sometimes, something edits your registry, or you get a root kit, or any number of other serious problems that don’t get fixed by a reboot. And if you don’t have a good backup, and don’t have both the install media and the time/resources to rebuild your entire system from scratch… you’re stuck with whatever mysterious problem happened, until you can start over, because no one knows what you did to your own system, and no one knows what someone else did to your system, and so no one can fix it.

Troubleshooting can be prohibitively complicated.

Basically, once you figure out you can’t fix it, you need to back up everything you can save, and start the reinstall process.

But then!

You have to be very careful upon adding “third-party” stuff to your OS, because it’s likely that one of those things you started using, somewhere along the way, is what caused the problem you can’t figure out how to solve. And if you install and use that same thing, in the same ways as last time, it’s going to corrupt your system again, unless they patched it not to do so.

All this becomes extremely tedious and exhausting, to the point where you’re tired of dealing with it, and may give up computing entirely, because the things you want to compute, keep corrupting your system, and “ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat!”

i had to go to some things, but i was going to say: if i’ve commented in your posts, you could see my email (which is a legit functioning email i’ve dedicated to SP use), but then i went and found your singular post and saw i hadn’t commented, so you wouldn’t be able to see my address… and then(!) i began composing a comment, to facilitate this, but then i stepped away for a bit.

Also, if you’ve commented on any of my posts (which i haven’t checked yet), i could get your email from there (assuming the one you used for your account actually works).