Monday of this week didn’t get off to the best start. I sat down at my laptop to do some work, turned it on, got a funny message from Microsoft Defender and from that point onwards nothing really worked.

I could boot up to a desktop, but it wasn’t my desktop. None of my icons were there and when I did eventually find my desk top they were is a VERY strange folder location. For many people this would have been a disaster but at least I can say I’m an I.T. professional and therefore all that was on my hard drive was installed applications, configuration files and icons (shortcuts to you post Windows 95 kids). Everything else was safe on my Western Digital Home Cloud drive which I backup to a second SSD drive every week. Bit belt and braces but when you have days like this it makes you feel extremely smug with yourself.

So, I decided it was time to flatten everything, install a completely clean, new copy of Windows 11 and reinstall all my logging and and other software.

It didn’t go 100% smoothly at first and took 2 attempts to get Windows installed. But once I had the operating system in and working I dropped everything else back in and restored all the configuration and data files in which restored everything back to a working condition.

It took several hours to do and with the way my brain works these days I needed to take several breaks throughout the process. It triggered off some mental health issues for me that I needed to address over the following days but over all I really enjoyed the entire process. It’s what I used to do everyday before I retired and it’s nice to know that I can still hack it today.

I now have a laptop that is running as smooth as silk . It starts and shuts down very quickly and just about every aspect of it is exactly how I want. Once I had everything back up and running I had a day or so “polishing” the setup and implementing processes that I never quite got around to before which will make it much quicker to get back up and running should the OS fail again. I’ve also removed Microsoft Onedrive from my laptop completely. I can not be 100% sure but I suspect it had something to do with what went wrong.

Finally I created a Windows Recovery USB Stick giving me the option to rebuild the SSD from scratch should I need to.