Yep, guess I’ll be upgrading in a few months. I suppose it could be weeks if we’re really lucky.

You are mistaking a “concerted effort” with a general consensus that free VPNs are not a great idea. “If a service is free, you are not the customer, you are the product” is a pretty good rule of thumb. Your downvotes aren’t necessarily a conspiracy here.

I’ve tried using SFC multiple times and had it work zero times. One time after SFC failed to find anything wrong, I ended up fixing the machine by replacing the system file with a copy from a working machine.