Run These 9 CMD Commands Now to Repair Windows in Minutes

If your PC has been throwing error at you, freezing, crashing, losing internet for no reason or just generally acting like it hates you, stop. Don't reinstall Windows, don't pay for some random repair app you saw in an ad and don't take it to a shop. Open Command Prompt instead. There are 9 commands built right into Windows that can fix most of this stuff on their own and I'm going to walk you through every single one. Every command coming up needs administrator access, just to let you know, so let's open command prompt the right way. Hit the search bar in your taskbar, type cmd and once you see command prompt in the results, right click on it and choose run as administrator. Hit yes on the permission prompt. Don't close this window after each prompt, we'll be running everything from this same one. So, first command and honestly the one I would run before anything else. In the window type winget upgrade dash dash all and press enter. Winget is the package manager Microsoft baked into Windows and what this single line does is hunt down every installed app on your machine that has a newer version available and update all of them in one shot. Browsers, media players, drivers registered with the manager, productivity tools, the lot. A massive chunk of the random problems people blame on Windows itself are actually just outdated apps fighting with each other. Knocking them all down at once eliminates that whole category of issues before you even start troubleshooting. If you'd rather see what's about to update before pulling the trigger, just type winget upgrade on its own first and you'll get a full list. Make this a habit once a month and your PC will definitely thank you. The second command is sfc forward slash scan now. SFC stands for system file checker and what it does is sweep through every protected Windows system file on your drive, compare each one against a clean reference copy and replace anything that looks corrupted or tampered with. Type sfc space slash scan now and press enter. The scan kicks off and shows you a progress percentage as it works through the files. When it finishes, you'll get one of three messages. Either it found nothing wrong, which means your system files are clean, it found problems and fixed them, in which case restart, run it again and confirm, or it found problems and couldn't fix some of them, which is the message you don't want to see. If that last one shows up, just don't worry. The next command on the list is built specifically to handle exactly that situation. Now restart your PC before moving on either way. The third command goes hand in hand with the one you just ran, sfc scan now. It is DISM or DISM stands for Deployment Image Servicing and Management and it works on a deeper layer than SFC. The reason SFC sometimes fails to repair files is because the reference store it pulls clean copies from can itself be corrupted. DISM fixes that store by reaching out to Microsoft servers and pulling fresh verified system components straight from the source. Type the following exactly. DISM DISM space slash online space slash cleanup dash image space slash restore health and press enter. You'll need an active internet connection for this one and it can take 15 to 20 minutes depending on your speed and how much repair work it has to do. Once it tells you the operation completed successfully, restart your PC and run sfc slash scan now one more time. Running these two together in this order, DISM first then SFC, is way more effective than running SFC alone. The fourth command is for your actual hard drive. CHKDSK, it's short for check disk, scans your storage for two kinds of problems. File system errors, where the directory structure of the drive has gotten out of whack, and physical bad sectors, which are spots on the drive that can no longer hold data reliably. There are a few versions of this command, but the one I always reach for is CHKDSK space slash R. The slash R flag does the deep scan, finds bad sectors, salvages whatever readable data is left in them and then includes the file system fix automatically. Type CHKDSK space slash R and press enter. Because your C drive is busy running Windows right now, the scan can run live. You'll get a prompt asking if you want to schedule it for the next restart. Type Y or yes and press enter, then reboot your PC. Windows runs the full scan before it loads, shows you what it found and boots normally. The fifth command is the first stop for any internet weirdness. Your PC keeps a local list of websites and their addresses to load pages faster, and when entries on that list go stale or break, sites stop loading or load wrong even though your connection looks fine. Type IPCONFIG space slash FLUSHDNS and press enter. You'll see a confirmation that the DNS resolver cache was cleared. From now on, your PC asks for fresh address info every time you visit a site. While we're in here, run two more commands that pair perfectly with this one. Type IPCONFIG space slash RELEASE and press enter, which drops your current IP address. Then type IPCONFIG space slash RENEW and press enter, which grabs a fresh one from your router. These three combo commands FLUSH, RELEASE, RENEW is the move I always run first when somebody tells me their internet is connected but nothing's actually working. Solves a surprising number of those exact issues without touching the router or restarting anything. The sixth command goes deeper than the last one. If the previous fix didn't sort your network out, the problem is probably sitting in the Windows networking stack itself. There's a piece of the Windows called WINSOCK catalog that handles communication between your apps and the network, and when it gets corrupted, weird, apps can't reach the internet, downloads die randomly, certain sites flat out refuse to load. Type NETSH space WINSOCK space RESET and press enter. You'll get a message that the catalog was reset successfully. While you're at it, run these two right after. Type NETSH space INT space IP space RESET and press enter, which resets the entire TCP IP stack to factory defaults. Then type NETSH space INT space TCP space RESET and press enter, which handles TCP connection settings specifically. After all three of these, you absolutely have to restart your PC, otherwise, none of it actually takes effect. This combo fixes a lot of stubborn network problems that survive driver reinstalls and router reboots. Seventh command checks something most people never think about until it's too late. The actual health of your hard drive or SSD. Modern drives keep track of their own condition internally and Windows can ask them for a status report. The classic command for this used to be WMIC, but Microsoft has been phasing it out, so we're using PowerShell instead, which works on every current version of Windows 10 and Windows 11. Here's the trick. You can run PowerShell commands from inside command prompt without opening a separate window. Type this exactly. PowerShell space quote get dash physical disk pipe format dash table friendly name comma media type comma health status comma operational status quote and press enter. In a couple of seconds, you'll get back a clean table listing every drive in your PC, what type it is, and whether it's reporting healthy or not. If you see anything other than healthy in that column, start backing up your data immediately, because the drive is on its way out. The eighth command is for those moments when your PC is dragging and you have no idea what's chewing up the resources. Task manager is one option, that's sure, but the command line gives you the same information faster and lets you do something about it in the same window. Type task list and press enter. You'll see a long list of every process currently running on your PC, along with a process ID number, called a PID, in the second column. Look for anything you don't recognize that's hogging the memory in the rightmost column. If you spot something suspicious or a frozen app eating resources, write down its PID. Then type task kill space slash PID space the number you wrote down space slash F and press enter. The slash F flag at the end forces it to close even if it's not responding. And boom, gone. You can also kill by name with task kill slash im space then the process name. Useful when an app refuses to close through normal means. Ninth and final command before the bonus. This one is gold for laptop owners and anyone whose PC seems to drain power weirdly or refuses to sleep properly. Type power cfg space slash energy and press enter. Windows watches your system for a full 60 seconds while it does this, so leave the window alone and don't touch anything. When it finishes, it spits out a detailed HTML report and saves it to c colon backslash windows backslash system32 backslash energy dash report dot html. The command output will tell you the exact path. Copy that path, paste it into the browser address bar. And the report opens up. Inside you'll see a breakdown of every energy related issue on your PC, things keeping your machine awake when it should be sleeping, USB devices waking up randomly, power policies that are misconfigured, drivers behaving badly. For laptop users especially, this report is a gold mine for figuring out why your battery is draining faster than it should be. Now for the bonus and this one isn't actually a CMD command, but it absolutely deserves to be in any Windows repair toolkit. The Windows Memory Diagnostic. Bad RAM is the silent killer behind a shocking number of weird Windows problems. Random crashes, blue screens, apps closing for no reason, file corrupting out of nowhere. People blame Windows for all of it when the real culprit is a faulty stick of memory. Windows has a built-in tester for this and almost nobody knows about it. Click the search bar, type mdsched and press enter. A small Windows opens up with two options. One is to restart now and run tests immediately. The other lets you schedule it for the next time you reboot. Pick whichever fits your schedule. On the next boot, before Windows even starts loading, the diagnostic runs a full scan of every RAM module in your system and tells you if anything is broken. If it finds errors, the answer isn't software at all, it's a hardware and you need to replace the bad stick. Now that's the full list. Drop a comment letting me know which command saved you the most headache and hit subscribe if you want more guides like this and I'll see you in the next one.