Yeah, basically that. I'm back at work in Windows land on a Monday morning, and pondering what sadist at Microsoft included these features. It's not hyperbole to say that the startup repair, and the troubleshooters in settings, have never fixed an issue I've encountered with Windows. Not even once. Is this typical?
ETA: I've learned from reading the responses that the Windows troubleshooters primarily look for missing or broken drivers, and sometimes fix things just by restarting a service, so they're useful if you have troublesome hardware.
Yeah, on Win98 (or maybe Win2k), it would always find this obscure sound card driver for this crappy sound card in this Packard Bell I had. Amazing.
But not once ever for any other issue before or since.
The troubleshooter was legitimately good in Win2k. And has sucked since they unified kernels.
Yes it has.
I used to have a sound issue and the repair wizard would always fix it. It would happen again, I think after the next reboot.
I've used startup repair many, many times to repair systems. The troubleshooters have never worked for me, no matter how minor the issue that needed to be fixed.
The network troubleshooter often works alright. Just never run it if you have setup a bunch of virtual switches in hyper V or something, because it will delete them or otherwise fuck them up and it's pretty annoying to restore (you have to remove them via device Manager and stuff)
Not that I've ever seen. It usually means it's time to reinstall.
The Windows network troubleshooter is black magic from the depths of hell itself and is very opinionated and selective in choosing which issues to fix and whether you'll need to bargain your soul to recieve said fix. I have red hair and find it doesn't bother bartering with me, but your mileage may vary.
It fixed an issue for me once back on like Windows Vista I think.
I think it pointed out the right direction at least once, back when i was doing tech support (xp and pre-xp). Back when the toolkit includes whole stacks of cd's containing every driver known to exist. I don't even remember what it is, but it was something Realtek.
A while back I had network issues, ran the troubleshooter and apparently the IP address was incorrect. Went into Control Panel, changed it and it worked again. Not sure why the troubleshooter couldn't do that but whatever.
My old desktop seemed to have something wrong with its LAN port and the troubleshooter fixed it pretty consistently.
I've never needed the startup repair, but the troubleshooter does occasionally fix network or audio related things. I don't do enough to need it very often anymore.
