She looked at the lonely RAM stick on her desk—a cheap piece of silicon that had nearly corrupted her thesis data, caused three sleepless nights, and made her doubt her own machine. mdsched.exe hadn’t fixed anything. It had simply told her the truth.

Login screen. Her fingers trembled as she typed her PIN. Desktop loads. And then, rising from the system tray like a ghost from a grave, a notification from the Action Center:

The screen went black. A few seconds of terror—did she just kill it for good?—then the familiar Windows boot logo, but underneath, white text on a blue field: .