Yeah, basically that. I’m back at work in Windows land on a Monday morning, and pondering what sadist at Microsoft included these features. It’s not hyperbole to say that the startup repair, and the troubleshooters in settings, have never fixed an issue I’ve encountered with Windows. Not even once. Is this typical?
ETA: I’ve learned from reading the responses that the Windows troubleshooters primarily look for missing or broken drivers, and sometimes fix things just by restarting a service, so they’re useful if you have troublesome hardware.
If the problem can be solved by a restart of that thing’s service (audio, network, etc.) then it has fixed things for me in the past.
Pretty much no other solution (especially the running old games one) has ever worked in the troubleshooter without me having to tinker with it further.
Oh, man, I may have to eat crow on this one! This reminds me how, at my previous job, the lousy HP printer driver would freeze up and stop printing. I could get it printing again by going into Services and re-starting the printer service. It was more convenient, and easier to train my staff, to just run the printing troubleshooter. It never reported a problem, but it did re-start the printer service, which fixed the immediate issue.
Moral of the story: Only an HP deals in absolutes.