Here’s an example of a post that shows promise but the user was struggling just as much as we were. There were ways of doing it in the registry, via pre-made packages that you can get from Microsoft and countless other suggestions as well, like uninstalling the application that is giving us the problem and reinstalling which also did not work in our case. We ended up reading countless other alternative ways to fix broken file associations on Google. Alternative Methods of Fixing File Associations The bigger question is this: What if you have already tried the normal procedures to correct or fix your default file associations and none of them worked? Now what? Well that’s the exact problem we ran into with one of our customers. There are several great articles that cover the proper way to go about changing file associations on Windows 10, Windows 7 and Windows XP (hopefully you are still not using Windows XP) Below are some of our favorite articles that cover this topic in detail. Now this is a common problem and it is thoroughly documented all over the Internet for the specific Windows version you are using. Common Ways to Fix Broken File Associations In these cases you need to fix the broken file association otherwise Windows will have no idea what program to use to open your file. But occasionally, there is some kind of corruption that may occur because of a virus, a poorly written program or the evil computer gremlins. Normally this all works without a hitch and Windows has all these extensions loaded already and knows which files are opened with which programs. So when you double click a file that ends in docx, Windows should be smart enough to know that you want to open that file with Microsoft Word. xls that lets Windows know which program to use to open that kind of file. Every file type has some kind of extension at the end of its name like resume. This problem involves going to open some kind of file like a word document, an excel spreadsheet, or browser shortcut and Windows has no idea how to open the file. We have written about the topic of unable to open certain files before but it’s been a while so lets revisit the modern version. A common tech problem we get all way from Windows 7 to Windows 10 is broken file associations. This of course, is very frustrating to our customers and technicians alike. Every now and then we do run into a problem that we have solved before but the typical list of solutions that used to work no longer works. We have fixed over 10,000 computers in the 13 years we have been business. At Boxaid we have seen every technical computer problem in existence.

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