Windows Users: Always Make Sure You Have Recent Working Restore Point and Windows Repair Disc

The latest Windows 10 update (which no one should turn off so as to keep the ransomware criminals at bay) seems to have scrambled something.   I sat for a couple hours at the Jeep dealer getting the Piglet's transmission fluid flushed.  (I wish I had an f word for transmission just for the alliteration).  So I took my laptop and got some time with my Western Civ students. 

When I got home the docking station and the external monitors attached no longer worked.  This is never a great surprise.   Windows 10 updates often scramble the device drivers.  As long as you have a recent system restore point you can work around this until the next Windows 10 update comes through that actually works.  But I thought system restore points were created regularly.   I guess not.  And something became confused when I rebooted.  It went into the Repairing Windows loop where it never stops trying to repair the boot files.  Three power offs in a row and it stops biting its own tail.

So no luck restoring from my network backup system image.  I thought I was going to need to do a full reinstall from the recovery partition (which means restoring all your files from your daily backups, which you do, right? and then reinstalling all applications). Fortunately none of the online instructions actually worked.   Somehow I persuaded the Windows "I am in so deep the elephant dung leaves meteor trails" recovery tools to do a successful recovery of Windows 10.  So immediately I created a restore point and a Windows System Repair DVD.