These hidden Windows repair tricks fix corrupted files—and Microsoft won’t tell you about it

Corruption is bad in any walk of life, but you certainly don’t want it in your computer. Yet when your apps aren’t working correctly, or Windows seems to just crash for no reason, there’s a good chance file corruption is the culprit.

If you’re really lucky, Windows will straight up give you an error message that cites file corruption or alludes to files being unreadable. Either way, there are more than a few ways to quickly restore corrupted Windows system files without doing anything drastic—like a complete hard drive wipe and reinstallation.

Understanding why Windows files become corrupted

Prevention is always better than the cure, and understanding why your files were corrupted in the first place is a good way to avoid it happening again in the future. These are some common causes:

• Sudden power loss.
• …