3 ms·

Ooh, I'm just going to jump on this chance, because I wondered for ages: What is "repair" for? What exactly does it do, and what's the intended use case? I r

Ooh, I'm just going to jump on this chance, because I wondered for ages: What is "repair" for? What exactly does it do, and what's the intended use case? I rarely do much on Windows these days, but my impression was that the age of random applications dumping DLL and OCX files into system32 was fortunately long over, so programs stepping over each other should be almost nonexistent at this point.

chiph 3y ago
It's basically a reinstall where the user's configuration and preferences are preserved. As to why - perhaps a file got corrupted (rare, these days). But often what happens is another program overwrites a shared file to one that is incompatible with your application. Or the user watches a video that tells them about this secret hack that makes your computer run faster... Story time regarding DLL naming from the old days - Windows 95 would only keep one copy of a DLL in memory (the days when having 8mb of RAM was amazing). We had developed an application that worked perfectly, except on this one salesman's laptop - where it would only work occasionally. What I found was they had installed "Tiger Woods Golf" on their machine and it had a DLL with the exact same name as ours. If the salesman played the game before running our application, Windows said "Oh, I already have that DLL. No need to load it again." and our app would blow up.