I bought my first PC/compatible while I was a professor in the late 80's. Most of my graduate school papers were actually typed via a Commodore 64, but I wrote my dissertation using Samna in a 2-PC department faculty lab available to department student employees if faculty weren't using them (I was a teaching fellow and didn't have the budget to buy my own). Each faculty member now had a PC in his office. I had backups of my dissertation document, which is a good thing because once Samna went crazy and corrupted my workfile floppy disk. I ended up losing a week's worth of work since the last usable backup. I did have use of an office PC for my three faculty appointments, but I bought my first PC clone in Milwaukee (roughly $2800 for a desktop). I later bought a bulky portable with a handle on the end because I remember needing to do work during a Boston academic conference. I don't recall what happened to them (repair issues?), but quite frankly after Windows 3, I needed more RAM to do stuff and bought a second desktop. Then in the late 90's, I did a lot of road warrior work and bought my first modern notebook computer. I've probably bought a new replacement every 2 or 3 years.
In maybe 2-3 cases, I've had the worst experience with coffee spills. I never kept a coffee cup near the PC, but even a minor splatter on the keyboard could render the notebook all but useless. [In another case, with my one and only Sony, the power button no longer worked after 8 months. I tried to send it to a laptap repair shop, but they refused to accept it.]
At some point I wanted to have a backup PC just in case I had to cope with an outage (email, work, etc.) I had one HP notebook with a dying hard drive, and I bought a new notebook (making more sense to get more RAM, hard drive, newer Windows vs. sinking more money into repairing an obsoleted PC). As the backup PC eventually failed I replaced it with a cheap desktop.
When I moved to WV, my new place was furnished, so I put my desktop in storage with most of my stuff. I had hired some helpers, but the unload was done without me (work schedule). Long story short, my laptop shorted out (a splatter victim which ultimately shorted out). Now actually years back I had started using laptop stands and external keyboards and mice to minimize the risk of coffee incidents, but I had misplaced my stand during the move and had a freakish splatter accident.
I went to my storage unit, and the movers had buried it somewhere in the filled unit, and I didn't want to spent hours in freezing weather (outside unit) pulling everything out. There was a Sam's Club about 3 miles from my new work location, which is where I bought my current workhorse notebook maybe 18 months back. I wasn't going to buy a second backup PC. When I moved into my current SC unfurnished apartment, I had my helpers bring the desktop in (other stuff went back into storage).
But try as I might, I could not get the desktop to start up. Had it died while in storage (not climate-controlled)? For months, I debated hauling the dead desktop to the dumpster. In the meanwhile I bought an inexpensive notebook as a backup to replace the desktop.
This may seem unrelated but years earlier I had licensed copies of Rollback RX for my PCs. Rollback RX basically allowed you to go back to a prior manual or automated daily snapshot (e.g., something happens and your PC won't start up). I ran into chronic issues with Rollback RX on my new workhorse notebook. I think I had to go back to do a factory-level reset (meaning all of my data and applications were lost and had to be reinstalled from backups) something like 4 times in the first 2 months. I began to suspect Rollback RX was causing my instability issues and did not reinstall the last time--and haven't had a similar problem since then.
Going back to the dead disktop: I don't know if it was an artifact of wiring, but in a final check putting plugs in different sockets and I noticed a flicker of life in the desktop. I managed to get to boot but I had major stability issues, and Rollback RX wasn't helping. I deinstalled Rollback RX and/or went through a factory-level reset, and the desktop has been stable since.
So that's how I ended up with two existing backup PCs. I also have several layers of redundancy including external drives, Google Drive, and Dropbox. I mostly go on the backup PC's to update securities, applications, and Microsoft patches. And that provides a context for the following issues I experienced over the weekend.
What's truly odd is that I run into different technical problems on the 3 PC's. I noticed that Windows had delivered updates to my workhorse notebook over the weekend. So I decided to do maintenance on the two backup PC's.
The backup notebook experienced an issue I've had to resolve multiple times over the years. Somehow the Windows Software Distribution folder has been corrupted. The standard remedy is to stop the Windows update and BITS services, drop the software distribution folder, and restart services. In this case, the Windows update seemed to be stuck at about 8% for hours. Granted, a number of times you need to give patches some time to download, but even after hours and reboots, no progress. For some reason the software distribution folder was sticky to delete, even after checking services down. I eventually succeeded after a series of reboots, started up the services and probably within 90 minutes the patches in question were downloaded and installed.
The desktop issue didn't deal with the patching so much as something I had noticed but had not resolved: the Start Menu was not working. There were workarounds for the most part. For example, in Windows 10, I was used to going to the Start Menu to access Settings for checking on Updates. I subsequently discovered Win-I could bring up Settings. At some point I was getting a message to the effect that there was a critical issue with the Start Menu and I needed to sign out then sign back in so the problem could be resolved. It didn't happen. I did some digging and found a Microsoft reference to downloading and running a start menu troubleshooter. Long story short; I got some unusable cryptic error message on problems with Windows shell experience host and cortana. I searched a number of posts and forums with suggestions on running certain Powershell scripts, even creating a new Windows user.
What turned out to be the problem was the installation of Dropbox. (I believe that I ran across this solution, which suggested Dropbox and/or Avast were often at fault.) Once I uninstalled Dropbox and rebooted, I was able to use the start menu as expected. It's not immediately obvious why Dropbox is an issue because it hasn't been for my notebook PC's.
