[Galili]

My Dell Inspiron i7 has been running windows 8.1 just fine for about three years now.
Without downloading or installing anything new in the past few days, today it suddenly booted to a black desktop background with the defaultdark blue color scheme, and many functions do not work - quick launch menu isn t responding, side bars aren t showing up. Windows I manage to open don t show up on the bottom bar, Alt+Tab doesn t work, using two fingers on the mouse pad doesn t work, and so on.
everything is also very slow.

I ve restarted the computer several times and ran Avast and Malwarebytes scans with no findings.

Any ideas what might cause this and how to fix it?

 

[spunk.funk]

If you can login, go to Search and type CMD, Right click the CMD results and Run As Administrator. In the Elevated Command Prompt, type SFC /scannow and press enter. This will replace any missing system files.
If you have a different desktop background and cannot find your personal files (eg) Pictures, Music, etc then your profile may have become corrupted and Windows loads a Default Profile.
Create a New User with Admin rights log out of the user profile you are in and login as the new user. Copy your User files to your new profile. Fix a corrupted user profile - Windows Help

 

[Galili]

Hey, so what ended up sort of working was a system restore.
Reboot took me to the same black background and then informed me that the system restore failed and settings remain the same, but further inspection showed everything was working again. I had to re-set my BG and color scheme, and the slowdown took a while longer to go away, but now everything is back to normal.

Thanks anyway

 

[TexasBandit]

Restore points are cumulative, so if there is a bad restore point in the mix, restore from that point on will not work. If your restore is not working, it would be a good idea to delete the old restore points and create a new one. Be sure the system is running correctly and create the new restore point. That would give you restore functionality should you need it in the future.

 

[Galili]

Thanks, will do.