Chapter 4: Maintaining Your System
In This Chapter
Understanding Refresh, Restart, and restore points, and older names
Creating a Password Reset Disk
Maintaining hard drives and SSDs
Zipping and compressing
Windows is a computer program, not a Cracker Jack toy, and it will have problems. The trick lies in making sure that you don’t have problems, too.
Windows is notorious for crashing and freezing, making it impossible to start the computer, or garbling things so badly that you’d think the screen went through a garbage disposal. Microsoft has poured a lot of time, effort, and money into teaching Windows how to heal itself. You can take advantage of all that work — if you know where to find it.
All of Book VIII is devoted to the topic of how to keep Windows alive and well. In this chapter, I introduce you to the basic ideas, and get you started with some of the parts of Windows that you can use in many different ways. If you log on to Windows with a local account (as opposed to a Microsoft account, which is always an e-mail address), I also want to cajole you into creating a Password ...
