Ed Bott - Windows 10 Support Secrets

109 CHAPTER 8 | Troubleshooting and recovery Other troubleshooting tools Many people don’t realize that Windows includes a wide-ranging collection of automated troubleshooters that can walk you through the tedious steps that you’d need to perform if you called a support tech. Running one of these troubleshooters should be a first step before going too much further. To see a categorized list of these built-in tools, open Control Panel, type trouble in the search box, and then click Troubleshooting (Control Panel) from the results list. That opens a page like the one in Figure 8-6. Figure 8-6: You can browse this list of built-in troubleshooters by category, but it’s often more efficient to type a keyword in the search box. Figure 8-7 shows the Configure A Device troubleshooter in action. In this example, it found a potential problem with a device driver and offered to reinstall it. Figure 8-7: The built-in troubleshooters are cautious by default, asking for permission before performing actions that might affect your system’s stability.