Mike Halsey - Windows 10 Troubleshooting: Learn to Troubleshoot and Repair Windows 10 Problems Like the Pros Do

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A couple of years ago, I moved from the United Kingdom to the south of France and bought a house in the countryside. This house came with a gte, which is a guest outhouse that is very common in France. I decided this gte would become my office, so with the help of a very talented friend and some antique wood found in a neighbors barn, I set about creating an appropriate desk space in what would be both an office and my own personal computer museum.

This museum contains all of the computers I have used and loved throughout my life, including an original IBM 5150 PC and lots of home computers from Sinclair Research in the 1980s and handhelds from Psion in the 1990s. Among the collection though is an original, shrink-wrapped box containing the floppy disk (both 3.5 inch and 5.25 inch) installers for Windows 3.1.

Its astonishing just how far Windows has come since those shaky, flaky times of 16-bit code. I remember how frustrating Windows 98 was to use, and how utterly unreliable Windows Me could be. When Microsoft released Windows 2000, however, everything started to change.

Yes, XP could still be unreliable and reinstalling it from fresh once a year was always considered good practice if you had the time and resources, but it worked, was stable, and came with some handy extras such as System Restore.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 added even more of these useful tools including the User Account Control (UAC), the Reliability Monitor, and the truly excellent Steps Recorder that was originally only supposed to be a debugging tool for the Windows 7 Beta, but was so popular it remains in Windows to this day.

Throughout all of these feature additions for troubleshooting, diagnosis, and repair, the versions of Windows they shipped with became ever more reliable, in what I call an interesting dichotomy perhaps best expressed by the graph in Figure .

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About the Author

Mike Halsey

has been a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) awardee since 2011 and is a recognized technical expert. As the author of Windows 7, 8, and 10 troubleshooting books and associated video courses, he is well versed in the problems and issues that PC users, IT pros, and system administrators face when administering and maintaining all aspects of a PC ecosystem.

Mike understands that some subjects can be intimidating for some people and that everybody is different, so he approaches each subject area in straightforward and easy-to-understand ways.

Mike is originally from the United Kingdom, but now lives in the south of France with his rescue border collies, Evan and Robbie. You can contact Mike on Twitter at @MikeHalsey .