Transcript
all of a sudden their computer gets wonky, it stops updating or it starts crashing, things like that. And I feel like whenever that comes up, especially you go to Reddit, other forums, Discord, people always recommend a couple of things, a couple of commands to run, hey, just run this, see if that fixes it, right? And they recommend SFC and DISM. So, but the problem is they recommend it in that order. So system file checker and DISM, that's not the correct order. The order matters. The order does matter here. And so I've seen it enough on the internet where it's like, hey, run SFC, scan now, and then run DISM, yada, yada, restore health. I've seen it enough on the internet, it's like, well, you're kind of bypassing an issue. You need to start like, we talked a little while ago about the OSI model, like, hey, when you're troubleshooting, start at the bottom layer, work your way up, right? Similar to these commands, you want to start at your foundation, which SFC is not. That's kind of like top level. And that's what people are like saying, hey, run this first. And that's not what you want to do, because there might be underlying issues that you're not addressing at that point. So I figured, let's talk about them real quick, just kind of like put out there, hey, what do these things actually do? Why does the order matter? And I'm going to add one more to this, and that's going to be check disk, right? We start with that. We start with check disk. So I'm going to pull this up, and I'm just going to run it here. So this by itself should just run, it'll probably take about a minute. This is going to go through your partition itself. So right now we're running it from the C drive. So it's checking the C drive partition. It's checking things like your MFT, your directory indexes. It's not checking your sectors at this point, but again, this is only read only. So it's not making me restart or anything like this, but this is checking like the foundational level of your disk, making sure your files, your pointers, things like that are all functioning properly. If it finds errors here, which it didn't, didn't find any bad sectors, everything looks good, only took about 30 seconds to run. Again, that was a pretty easy test. However, this can take up some time. If you're running slash F to actually fix things that it finds, it's going to need to do that after the next restart. So usually if you run that, it'll say, hey, we'll go ahead and do it the next time you restart your computer. I would start here because this is like, if you have pointers that are messed up or some that just don't exist, that's not going to be resolved if you just run DISM or SFC. So I would start with this. Again, this one takes a little bit more time. You could run just check this by itself and you could see 30 seconds, you know, kind of said, hey, everything looks good. There is one caveat I wanted to bring up because they're slash R. Recursive. Yeah. Well, no, I think it is recovering your sectors. I guess, I don't know what the R actually stands for. I don't know if it's repair, recursive, what, but I think it stands for really long time. I was going to say it's going to take a really long time, whatever it's doing. So this is actually going to repair, well, it might try to repair bad sectors or at least designate them as bad sectors so they stopped being used. So that can take a very, we're talking hours, hours and hours and hours and hours. So don't run that one unless you know you need to, unless your disk is bad, especially if you've got an SSD, which I feel like most people are on SSDs these days. You usually don't have to run that. You can use like Crystal Disk Info and get information from your SSD. Your SSD is smart enough to know it's like, hey, we're kind of, it's kind of like balancing itself, making sure and checking up on itself. If you do have a spinning disk, then you might want to run slash R, especially if it's older, especially if you're running into issues and it might find bad sectors and designate them as bad. Yeah. This kind of reminds me of defragging, which I used to do all the time with spinning disks, but I haven't, of course, done that forever. Yeah, exactly. Some people say, oh, hey, it's really bad for your SSD to do that. Honestly, it's not that bad to run slash R. You don't really need to, but it's not going to kill your SSD. Might do a little bit more read times on it, but it's not a big deal. I checked my SSD the other day using Crystal Disk Info. I think it's that for utility, which is awesome, by the way, definitely use that. And it was like, this was like a six or seven year old laptop and it was like 96% healthy SSD. So, I mean, we're good. We're good. All right, next one. Dism, deployment, image servicing, and management. Now, this one is where I would go next because, sorry, I was there. Sorry, I was reading Kilmer. It was so satisfying though. It was. I loved it. It really was. Dism's next up. Now, Dism, what Dism does is it actually checks your Windows SXS folder, which is kind of like a reserve copy of all of your system files. Okay. So, it basically keeps a copy of all of your system files. That way, if one of your system files becomes corrupt, gets deleted, things like that, you have a source to go and repair from. Okay. And you can actually see this. We can dive into Windows here, C, Windows, right there. So, this is a folder that basically, this is the component store. What Dism is going to do, and this is running, I should tell the actual command, because Dism does a lot of things. Dism, you can image with Dism, you can capture images, you can deploy features and things like that. Dism is a pretty powerful tool. The thing that people usually recommend is running slash online slash cleanup image, and they usually go to straight slash restore health. That's going to be like, hey, don't bother, do everything all at once. Okay. So, that's what people usually recommend. But a lot of times, I see it coming after SFC, which is not the way to go about it. But anyway, so, if you run Dism, I'll pull this back up, and we'll run just the scan. Okay. Online, cleanup image, and then just check health. This one should be quicker, because what this does is it says, okay, so right here, this one says the component store is repairable. So, at some point, some service, might have been Windows Update, might have been something else, flagged something in the component store as not right. And so, it flagged it saying, hey, you should probably repair this. Now, the interesting thing is, I ran into an issue where it was like, hey, it said it was fine, but then I actually did, no, it said it was bad, but then I actually did the scan, and it came back and said, oh, no, no, no, no, everything's fine. So, most people will usually just run slash restore health, and that is going to just, it's going to do your scan, and it's going to fix whatever it finds. So, go ahead and run that, then run SFC, because what SFC does is it checks for system files that are bad. Okay. These are the actual system files that are in use. It's like, hey, these are the system files that Windows is actually using to make your system run, right? Now, if it finds that those are bad, it's going to go back to that component store and be like, hey, I need this file because it's bad. Well, if the component store is messed up because you didn't run DISM, guess what? SFC has nowhere to go to grab that correct file. So, run DISM first, because what DISM is going to do is it's going to check with Windows Update, it's going to check, maybe you have a WIM file somewhere, maybe you've got a share setup to pull those files from. DISM is going to repair itself that Windows component store. SFC is going to rely on that component store to fix the existing system files. So, that's the order you want to run it. Again, some of these things can take a little bit, especially check disk, but that's what I would do if you're troubleshooting some kind of issue, Windows isn't updating, things like that, maybe a system is crashing that you just like unexplained, run check disk, run DISM, and run SFC. In that exact order. Yeah. Okay, awesome. Thanks, Brock. Yeah. Bye.
