MANY PEOPLE LOOK AT A WINDOWS reinstallation as a lazy way to
fix any and all ills. However, we consider it as being more of a last
resort. It’s a little like dealing with unruly children. Before taking
drastic action and shipping your PC off to military school, you should
really do everything you possibly can to fix the problems you’ve got,
and find out the cause of its misbehavior, because you might just find
that a simple solution works better. Heavy-handed metaphor aside,
keeping a keen eye on your PC’s actions isn’t particularly difficult,
because Windows 10 includes all the tools you might need at your
disposal: There’s the Task Manager (which you can pull up at any
time with a quick Ctrl-Shift-Escape); there’s Resource Monitor (type
“resmon” into the search bar) for a more detailed report on what’s
doing what; and there’s even the difficult-to-grok but absolutely
useful Event Viewer, which can throw up some worrying but utterly
benign messages, but also reveal the true cause of system crashes
or slowdowns.CLEAN LIVING
It is worth keeping your system clean, not in terms of hard
drive space (unless you’re critically full, in which case, you
should definitely start scrubbing), but in terms of the number
of things that are installed on your system, how up to date they
are, and how many of them you allow to just run whenever they
like and eat up your system resources in the process. In terms
of the latter, the Task Manager startup tab can give you some
clues, not just about those auto-running apps, but also about
the impact they tend to have on your startup process, and you
can also use it to disable their automatic execution. If you want
to get more involved with what happens at startup, Autoruns
(https://download.sysinternals.com/files/Autoruns.zip) gives you
much more granular and deep control, although you should3
THE POWER OF
ELBOW GREASE
upgrade install—running through the Windows 10 install process,
throwing fresh copies of all critical system files on to your PC,
but leaving everything else, including software, as is. Opting to
do this can (in theory) fix certain issues with your machine, and
it’s particularly effective against those problems that standard
Windows prodding techniques don’t solve. To per form an in-place
upgrade, you need to be logged into an administrative account,
have a good chunk of disk space free, and have secure boot
switched off (at least temporarily) in your UEFI settings.
Use the Windows 10 Media Creation tool (see above) to create
a USB stick, but don’t boot from it: Open the drive from within
Explorer, right-click the “setup.exe” file, and opt to run it with
administrator privileges. Run through the install process,
ensuring you check the box to keep all your files and apps. When
done, you’re left with your new, fresh Windows folder and a
separate “Windows.old” folder on your main drive, the latter of
which contains your previous install. It’s possible to roll back, if
ever y thing has fallen apar t, but don’t take this as an excuse not to
have a proper backup. When happy (you have 10 days to decide),
you can dump the “Windows.old” folder and reclaim that space.Choosing the reset option enables you to immediately select
whether to keep your files or not.The holy trinit y of s ystem spying: Task Manager, Resource Monitor, and Event Log.Windows made fresh
28 MAXIMUMPC OCT 2019 maximumpc.com