4 ms·

I run a small IT company and the Windows sysadmin stock answer to nearly all problems: C:\Windows\System32> sfc /scannow ... followed by "reinstall your ope

I run a small IT company and the Windows sysadmin stock answer to nearly all problems: C:\Windows\System32> sfc /scannow ... followed by "reinstall your operating system". OK so no harm done apart from rather a lot of downtime, assuming you can put it back together again. The number of times I see "disable your AV" still is frightening. I have a browser plugin that I discovered thanks to this parish called uBlacklist which you can use to try and clean up your search results by banning known bad sites from your results. social.microsoft.whatever was first ... 8) I also note an awful lot of Linux related link farms and "blogs" with ads and cloned content from other sources have surfaced over the last few years. WordPress is another quagmire. I could go on but basically, search is very close to completely screwed (but not quite.)

syshum 5y ago
Now Now... The Sysadmin stock answer to nearly all problems is shutdown /r /t 0 If that fails, then sfc /scannow
pixl97 5y ago
Disable your AV is a perfectly cromulent suggestion. It is a root kit that operates at the lowest level of your operating system, and any issue with it and it will affect every layer above it. Now, if disabling works you should set reasonable exclusions and enable the product again.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  So I install a rootkit… to save me from rootkits?
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    Yes you do. You install something with all privileges on your system that claims to keep the baddies out. Hopefully you choose wisely on what to install on your system. Hopefully you even know what is "wise" to install on your system. If you find out what is wise to use on your system, please let us know.
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      Microsoft Defender is pretty legit
- gerdesj 5y ago
  Disabling your AV is never a good starter for 10 and is often proffered as the canonical fix for a problem. I shudder to think how many people have been debagged and radished (I'll take your cromulent and raise you really odd) as a result of following "sage" advice. I read the logs and set exclusions until the damn thing works. I have briefly disabled the whole AV/firewall/browser plugin thing sometimes to double check but that is quite rare. When I smile my teeth make a "ping" sound and briefly flash white.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
Blog spam is the bane of the n00b programmer. Even if you’re not totally new and are merely picking up a new language, it turns tutorial hell into eternal Hell. Raspberry Pi tips is another quagmire of replicated garbage.
- gregjor 5y ago
  I've been mentoring a couple of junior programmers for a couple of years and I have seen the kind of junk tutorials and online misinformation they find. Some of it is useful because it shows so many bad ideas and implementations -- like studying a plane crash to find out what went wrong. I wrote an article about this back in 2007, regarding Javascript examples in an O'Reilly book -- a source I used to recommend because of the quality of their writing and editing (I no longer have that opinion). https://typicalprogrammer.com/learning-by-example-how-bad-code-propagates https://typicalprogrammer.com/learning-by-example-how-bad-co...
  - arp242 5y ago
    It's not just an issue with blogspam, plenty of "bookspam" as well. A few years ago a friend of my then-girlfriend was learning C for some project. The book she had was so badly written even I could hardly follow it, and I can already program in C. It's no surprise this part of her project failed. I started programming on MSX-BASIC (kind of like C64), and when we finally got a PC in 2000 or so I got a book titled "Learn C++ in 10 minutes". It was so bad hat I was turned off from programming for a few years, as I thought I just didn't have what it takes (it also didn't help that the tooling and "getting started" was much harder back then, especially on Windows; if I had known you could just download e.g. Python instead of mucking about with this pirated Visual Studio I probably would have had an easier time – but I didn't know about that. It wasn't until I started playing with FreeBSD a few years later that I got back in to programming).
- cerved 5y ago
  also csharp, python, JavaScript
voltagex_ 5y ago
Yeah, but what are your other options? * procmon, if you're lucky you'll catch WTF is going on somewhere deep in the registry * Hoping Microsoft still has the answer in a KB article somewhere (hope you didn't need any Server 2008/2012 stuff that was on UserVoice, it's gone now) * WinDBG if you're that good Which brings us back to cargo culted answers like sfc /scannow I wouldn't compeltely discount social.microsoft, very very occasionally it's had a tiny tidbit of information in between the people incorrecting each other.
- arp242 5y ago
  I used to fix Windows computers for a living; this was 10 years ago and I don't really know what changed in Windows 8/10 as I never used it, but I imagine it's roughly similar to XP and 7. With some knowledge and experience it's possible to fix a lot of problems. Actually, a lot of problems people chuck up to "Micro$ucks bad" are just hardware problems. If someone comes in with "I get random BSODs" then there's a good chance it's just faulty a faulty RAM module, disk, or something like that. The first step for random issues should always be to run memtest and a disk check tool (I don't recall the name of the tool I used for that, but there are some subtleties involved in testing this well, and I don't know the status of SSDs as this was kind of before they became common). Checking hardware is easy, checking software isn't. Software problems can be a bit trickier to solve, depending on what the issue is. They're very hard to debug remotely over the internet: but there's a lot more you can do than "sfc /scannow" if you're sitting in front of the computer. You really don't need WinDBG in most cases.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    Most problems can be solved if you want to put massive amounts of time in it. The issue you state, without realizing you've stated it, is that 'knowledge and experience' is in demand and expensive. So I have the option of investing a few hundred bucks of someone's time into fixing the issue, or running 'sfc /scannow' and surprisingly often fixing the problem.
    - arp242 5y ago

syshum 5y ago

Now Now... The Sysadmin stock answer to nearly all problems is shutdown /r /t 0 If that fails, then sfc /scannow

pixl97 5y ago

Disable your AV is a perfectly cromulent suggestion. It is a root kit that operates at the lowest level of your operating system, and any issue with it and it will affect every layer above it. Now, if disabling works you should set reasonable exclusions and enable the product again.

Aeolun 5y ago
So I install a rootkit… to save me from rootkits?
- gerdesj 5y ago
  Yes you do. You install something with all privileges on your system that claims to keep the baddies out. Hopefully you choose wisely on what to install on your system. Hopefully you even know what is "wise" to install on your system. If you find out what is wise to use on your system, please let us know.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    Microsoft Defender is pretty legit
gerdesj 5y ago
Disabling your AV is never a good starter for 10 and is often proffered as the canonical fix for a problem. I shudder to think how many people have been debagged and radished (I'll take your cromulent and raise you really odd) as a result of following "sage" advice. I read the logs and set exclusions until the damn thing works. I have briefly disabled the whole AV/firewall/browser plugin thing sometimes to double check but that is quite rare. When I smile my teeth make a "ping" sound and briefly flash white.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

Blog spam is the bane of the n00b programmer. Even if you’re not totally new and are merely picking up a new language, it turns tutorial hell into eternal Hell. Raspberry Pi tips is another quagmire of replicated garbage.

gregjor 5y ago
I've been mentoring a couple of junior programmers for a couple of years and I have seen the kind of junk tutorials and online misinformation they find. Some of it is useful because it shows so many bad ideas and implementations -- like studying a plane crash to find out what went wrong. I wrote an article about this back in 2007, regarding Javascript examples in an O'Reilly book -- a source I used to recommend because of the quality of their writing and editing (I no longer have that opinion). https://typicalprogrammer.com/learning-by-example-how-bad-code-propagates https://typicalprogrammer.com/learning-by-example-how-bad-co...
- arp242 5y ago
  It's not just an issue with blogspam, plenty of "bookspam" as well. A few years ago a friend of my then-girlfriend was learning C for some project. The book she had was so badly written even I could hardly follow it, and I can already program in C. It's no surprise this part of her project failed. I started programming on MSX-BASIC (kind of like C64), and when we finally got a PC in 2000 or so I got a book titled "Learn C++ in 10 minutes". It was so bad hat I was turned off from programming for a few years, as I thought I just didn't have what it takes (it also didn't help that the tooling and "getting started" was much harder back then, especially on Windows; if I had known you could just download e.g. Python instead of mucking about with this pirated Visual Studio I probably would have had an easier time – but I didn't know about that. It wasn't until I started playing with FreeBSD a few years later that I got back in to programming).
cerved 5y ago
also csharp, python, JavaScript

voltagex_ 5y ago

Yeah, but what are your other options? * procmon, if you're lucky you'll catch WTF is going on somewhere deep in the registry * Hoping Microsoft still has the answer in a KB article somewhere (hope you didn't need any Server 2008/2012 stuff that was on UserVoice, it's gone now) * WinDBG if you're that good Which brings us back to cargo culted answers like sfc /scannow I wouldn't compeltely discount social.microsoft, very very occasionally it's had a tiny tidbit of information in between the people incorrecting each other.

arp242 5y ago
I used to fix Windows computers for a living; this was 10 years ago and I don't really know what changed in Windows 8/10 as I never used it, but I imagine it's roughly similar to XP and 7. With some knowledge and experience it's possible to fix a lot of problems. Actually, a lot of problems people chuck up to "Micro$ucks bad" are just hardware problems. If someone comes in with "I get random BSODs" then there's a good chance it's just faulty a faulty RAM module, disk, or something like that. The first step for random issues should always be to run memtest and a disk check tool (I don't recall the name of the tool I used for that, but there are some subtleties involved in testing this well, and I don't know the status of SSDs as this was kind of before they became common). Checking hardware is easy, checking software isn't. Software problems can be a bit trickier to solve, depending on what the issue is. They're very hard to debug remotely over the internet: but there's a lot more you can do than "sfc /scannow" if you're sitting in front of the computer. You really don't need WinDBG in most cases.
- pixl97 5y ago
  Most problems can be solved if you want to put massive amounts of time in it. The issue you state, without realizing you've stated it, is that 'knowledge and experience' is in demand and expensive. So I have the option of investing a few hundred bucks of someone's time into fixing the issue, or running 'sfc /scannow' and surprisingly often fixing the problem.
  - arp242 5y ago