Reimage Review

Making home PC repairs is becoming more critical as more individuals start their own home businesses. Repairing a PC after a registry is corrupted is a non-trivial task but this article puts forward the logical approach to repairs along with a Reimage review for those instances when you need to resort to online PC maintenance software.

At the start of the year my home office desktop crashed with a blue screen error stating the registry hive could not be loaded. The hive is a grouping of configuration keys relating to a user and it had most likely been damaged due to my removing software off of the system that day.

The following sequence of repairs should be attempted to get the system back working:

-    Try using another Windows account. If their hive is undamaged then you should be able to get in and at least reclaim/backup personal data.

-    Hit F8 as Windows is starting up and choose to boot in Safe-Mode. This reduces the number of services running. If the hive fault relates to one of the services it restricts then you will be able to log in. If you maintain back-up copies of the registry then try rolling back to a working copy.

-    Start Windows from their boot disks and run all available system/hardware scans.

-    Lastly, resort to PC maintenance software.

For my situation I ultimately resorted to Reimage PC repair software to boot the system (from an application available on their site). Once the system was booted the Reimage repair and scan process checks the registry (for missing/erroneous keys), the operating system (for outdated/faulty files and device drivers) and application files.

The scan report highlighted dozens of issues with my registry file and the Reimage repair stage reset keys based on their knowledge base of what are healthy system settings. After a reboot the computer was back working better than ever with no issues reoccurring in the intervening months.

The key lessons from this was to maintain registry backups regularly, keep Windows boot disks handy at all times and lastly to be comforted by the thought that even blue screen faults can be remedied.