As I write this I’m sat in the office with a colleague’s PC running the ‘system file checker’ in a corner of the room. He owns a laptop, it’s getting on a bit now but still good, on which his copy of XP wouldn’t start up. He, like so many other people, hadn’t backed up his files so restoring the existing system, rather than formatting and reinstalling was the only real option.
The tools I’ve used for this are the ‘recovery console’ and, as I’ve previously said, the very useful ‘system file checker’. With Vista, Microsoft removed the recovery console and replaced it with an automated set of tools you could run from the install DVD. Better still, in Windows 7, these tools were included within the operating system itself, running automatically if Windows detects that it can’t start and saving people from having to dig deep within boxes to find their original DVD.
The system file checker is a different matter though. Once I’d got his copy of XP to start I then ran it only to discover that it wanted an XP Home Service Pack 3 install CD, so last night I had to create one of those for him. This is an extremely useful tool, run from the command SFC /SCANNOW at the command prompt, that will check the integrity of all the operating system files and, if it finds any that are corrupt, will restore them from the original install disk.
With Vista, Microsoft greatly improved the monitoring and performance tools within Windows itself and, with Windows 7, have made them even better. I still can’t understand though why the system file checker isn’t something that can either be run from the Start Menu or a tool that will run automatically under certain circumstances, like after a blue-screen and reboot or another failure that the Windows Error Log would class as ‘serious’.
PCs are years away from being consumer electronic devices still, but Microsoft have missed a trick with this. Hopefully Windows 8 will build on the already excellent recovery and diagnostic tools and automate this brilliant little utility.
