How Windows took two of my days for nothing.

It's sometimes funny to think that the operating system that powers billions of computers worldwide is actually pretty spaghetti in it (read: buggy and super hard to trace errors when they happen, imagine tracing a single noodle in a pile of spaghetti...that's what it means). It randomly happens to people that their desktop setup got restored to the defaults after installing Windows Updates, having bluescreens for whatever reason, etc. If you didn't get these problems for so long even if you use the operating system for every day...bless you, it's a miracle.

If you found me gone missing for the past few days (well I doubt anyone will notice it, given that everyone is following hundreds of people), it's because I'm busy dealing with my laptop's Windows installation. One of the updates refused to install and runtime errors are popping up everywhere - like heck, you don't expect to see this dialogue on every computer. I'm not even sure how I got this.

I mean....it's the login UI...

In fact, it got super hilarious. I was forcefully logged out once (rip unsaved work), sound driver runtime error, League of Legends had huge FPS drops and instabilities, Chrome crashing 20 times in 5 minutes, everything else randomly crashes if they feel like doing so. The entire system should be able to be considered as broken at that point and I don't even know what caused it. Most probably Windows Updates...or malware?

Not sure, I got that feeling that something is fishy. Since who knows, I really don't use any antivirus software on my system - I don't visit stupid sites and I know what I am doing most of the times. But I skipped security updates for one full month so probably something went in, I'm not sure.

Out of curiosity I went and downloaded Malwarebytes and see what it can find on my computer.

Half an hour later.

So.

What on Earth had I just witnessed.

I might have just set a new record for the most amount of threats found in one scan. Wow.

Almost every threat that Malwarebytes found is residing in the system32 folder - well that sounds dangerous - but I didn't think much and just clicked quarantine, followed by a reboot. You know, you should be super careful when doing stuff related to anything in the C:/Windows folder of your installation. Because that's what happened after I click quarantine.

Best part? I cannot even boot it because this will show up on every boot, and advanced reboot options seem to be broken because it takes forever to load (probably I ran out of patience but please, it's just an advanced boot menu...). I suspected that I did something to my Windows installation before (using things like DestroyWindows10Spying) so something should be modified in it, and it got mistaken as malware...who knows, I mean antivirus software is super sensitive and love false positives.

It took me one full night to backup my files from my other partition (HAIL LINUX REEEE), reinstall Windows from scratch, run all updates, and reinstall the stuff I need. I just realized that I forgot to backup my Ori and the Blind Forest save file...whatever, I'll just play it again...?

And now my Windows installation is finally back. Not like it's super important, but I still need it to run osu! and Office. Whatever, there's something I learnt from this - never do anything that you are not sure when using computers. Especially Windows. To be honest everything in Linux is easier to fix (unless you're a dick that does rm -rf / --no-preserve-root, if that so come and see me so I can slap you in the face), it's just a bunch of commands and there you go. But well, Windows. Shrug. It should still be possible to fix with commands but no one had time for that, fixing with a reinstall is faster.

End of post, see you next time~

--Lilacse