During the last 7 days I have been called out to four instances of Operating Systems that are no longer supported by Microsoft suddenly becoming unusable. This compares to no instances of this in the previous six months. When I see a pattern emerging I'm always slightly suspicious as to whether somebody is trying to tell people it is time to upgrade.
Two were Windows Vista and two were Windows 7 without Service Pack 1. Obviously, in an ideal world I don't recommend people run unsupported Operating Systems anyway but due to budgets or fear of upgrade some customers choose to do this and they are still customers. The two Windows Vista PC's were stuck in the startup repair loop that I often see with Windows 10 and the two Windows 7 PC's had their user profiles corrupted so they were unable to logon. In every case I was able to carry out a full repair with no data loss and in the case of the Windows 7 machines activated hidden accounts and made registry changes to resolve the issue but the average PC user won't know how to do this.
I strongly recommend that nobody runs a machine with a single user account. If the profile becomes corrupted and won't allow you to logon you are stuck. However, if you have a second account you can just log on with that one and use it to repair the first one. This also helps you if you forget the password. When you buy a new PC don't just answer the basic questions and think you're done, create a second account straight away, grant it admin rights and you will always have a way out if anything happens to your main account. If you see the message "user profile service failed to logon" in conjunction with "user profile cannot be loaded" then give me a shout on 07557 483438 or e-mail mark@churchdowncomputers.co.uk
