Another non genuine copy of Windows that is in fact genuine problem

Russ Smith · 15 Jun 2015

NoelDP said:

System Restore is definitely worth trying - but you may have to go back further than you or I would like.

It could have taken up to thirty days before yu got the notifications, after the actual problem first occurred.
If you want me to try and work out the actual date, please post your event logs...

Open Event Viewer

click on theWindows logs entry in the left pane to expand it.

Now click on theApplication entry - wait while it loads.

Click on 'File'in the menu bar and select Save...

Save the file asAppevt.evtx

Repeat for theSystem log

then zip both,and upload them.

Thanks but at this point I think I'm going to do nothing more and take one last crack at convincing MS to give me an ultimate code for free.

If I can't do that I'm just going to see when I can fit in the time to reinstall Windows from scratch.

My experience with restore has never been good, it either doesn't work, or the user insists they've backed everything up, you restore, and they they inform you a critical file is missing from somewhere and it's not in their backup and you're screwed.

NoelDP · 15 Jun 2015

That feeling I know!
However, System restore is not supposed to touch User files at all - there's a long list of the locations and file extensions that it doesn't even look at, somewhere in there (which is user-editable, or at least used to be).
Even if it fails catastrophically (which itself is rare) it should be possible to easily extract all user data to external media so long as the user hasn't (like I do) strewn the data folders all over the drive.