Windows Recovery Environment

- The absolute Phillips screwdriver of fixing any Windows system is the Windows Recovery Environment. Now, I want you to think about this for a minute. If I've got a brand new system, there's no Windows, there's no operating systems, there's nothing on it, and I want to install something. Well, I kind of need like a mini operating system just so I can start the installation process. In the Windows world, we call that the "Windows pre-installation environment" or "WinPE." Now, if I can do a little bit with this WinPE, at least I can get Windows installed on your hard drive. I can take WinPE, add a little bit more to it, in terms of utilities to work on my system, and create my ultimate Phillips screwdriver, "WinRE." Now, the trick is, how do you fire up WinRE? Well, if you've been watching other episodes, you've probably already made a boot drive, boot thumb drive. Or, if you need to, you can actually use the installation media that comes with Windows. So what I've done is on this system right here, I had a little bootable, and I plugged it in, and I'm booting it up, and welcome to WinPE. So if you take a look right here, this is the Windows pre-installation environment. This is exactly what you'd see if you were installing Windows. So I'm going to hit "Next". Now, normally I would just hit "Install Now", and it would continue within the Windows pre-installation environment and install Windows. But I'm not going to do that. We're going to light up the "WinRE" by clicking right here. Welcome to "WinRE". "WinRE" has all kinds of fun tools. In particular, if you take a look, it says, "Well go ahead and continue to Windows 10." Well, that's no fun. Let's go ahead and do some troubleshooting. So by default, you'll have five big options here. Number one is a "System Restore." If you have a system restore point that you have made and it's sitting on your system, you can get back to that system restore point. If you have a problem with updates, you've installed an update and it's giving you trouble, you can run "Uninstall Updates" right here and it will take a look on the system, see what updates were installed and give you a choice as to what updates you can uninstall. If you've made a system image, at this point, you can go ahead and do a "System Image Recovery." It will query you as to where that system image locates and you can go ahead and bring it down. This brings up an important point. I've always been a big fan of Windows system images. With Windows system images, I can go ahead and just image my entire hard drive. I can put it on a external hard drive if I want and then if I've got a problem, I can use WinRE right here and restore it.