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Computer strife
10 years ago
General
I apologize for my quiet... I've literally been pulled every which way since September for reasons which I've described in previous journals. I know people have been waiting to hear from me and it's bugging the hell out of me that my time is so short. It's because of that stress that I'm turning to this audience to try and solicit help for a problem that's getting in the way of my current freelance output, -my workstation is unreliably booting up.
Please forgive me for the long-winded nature of the post as I haven't proof-read it, I just need to put it out there to see what sort of comments I could get so that I don't lose more time as a result. Thanks in advance for any help that could be offered.
About three weeks ago I upgraded my OS from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Prior to this the Windows 10 analysis said that there was only one thing that was a potential compatability problem with my PC but that was related to a wifi protocol built into my motherboard which research on the ASUS forum suggested wasn't going to be an issue according to the people who had been running Win10 previews. I let my PC upgrade and it went through several reboots to fully complete the process and when it was done I went about continuing my illustration work. Then I shut the computer down and spent the next day out of town. When I attempted to turn on my computer the following Monday I was greeted with the BIOS screen showing the usual stuff, then I saw the new Microsoft Windows logo and suddenly my PC just powers off. Normally I would see the Windows logo and a little spinning series of dots rotating in a circle to indicate that the OS is loading, but no dots appeared... no error screen or warning alert either, just *poof*, -the system shut down.
I tried rebooting several times and the problem repeated exactly as above. At that point I started troubleshooting. I started by disconnecting USB peripherals and monitors in an attempt to remove potential boot up obstacles from the process. I encountered some success there, -with all the peripherals save for the mouse and keyboard removed and only one monitor I could boot up to Windows 10. Once back into the OS environment however I saw no error messages or logs to indicate that anything had interrupted the previous boot up attempts. Ordinarily if Windows fails to load the following boot up attempt will be pre-empted with a warning at the bios level telling you something happened and do you want to instead try booting Windows into "safe" mode in order to diagnose the problem. Nothing like that happened here. In fact once I was in the desktop environment everything was working just fine; all programs were working like normal, the wifi connection was established and no hardware difficulties were found.
HOWEVER, despite everything working fine when I then rebooted in order to reconnect all the various peripherals and monitors I found that the same problem occurred again: power - bios display - windows logo - power shutdown. What's more confusing though is that when I attempted to reconfigure the hardware in the same manner as it had previously booted up with a removal of all USB peripherals and only one monitor then the system failed to boot. I then tried disconnecting all the hard drives save for the boot up and I got it to boot up, but not consecutively. At this point I started panicking and called my motherboard manufacture to see what could be done.
The motherboard manufacture (ASUS) advised that I try updating all the drivers for the motherboard to Windows 10 compatability, and that was about as far as they could go. Fortunately I was able to haphazardly get the system to boot up and found that there really wasn't many drivers I needed to get, but after updating things I still wasn't getting consistent boot ups. Next I tried calling Microsoft.
Microsoft had me talking to them extensively. They advised that I check for all new drivers for everything on my system to insure Win10 compatability. Unfortunately it was taking so long for me to successfully boot back into the desktop environment that there was concern the OS install might be faulty. Microsoft had me attempt to crash the system during the boot process in order to somehow trigger safe mode activation, but it just wasn't happening. We went so far as to create a new boot up USB flash disk and changed the BIOS boot order so that we could get some kind of diagnostic process going, but this effort produced no results, -the Win10 tool couldn't fix any problems. Just as we were about to attempt a complete reinstall via the USB boot process I was able to get back into the desktop through some random alignment of the stars, and I immediately began the process of finding every last Win10 driver and update available. At THIS point I actually started getting some consecutive reboots to work and I was able to resume my normal work on the system.
Unfortunately I'm STILL not able to get my computer to start up reliably. I shut down my computer overnight and at least twice a week when I turn it on in the morning it won't come on. Usually unplugging USB peripherals will do the job, but this morning that didn't do it and that's why I'm now turning to the internet to see if someone can make a guess about what the hell is happening. I had been wondering if the problem might be related to an overtaxed power supply considering that when after a boot failed I would try again with USB peripherals removed, but the thing is that I've got a 1050 watt PSU that should be overkill for my needs, -and prior to installing Win10 I never had an issue like this before. I'm still having the occasional boot failure even after moving some of my USB peripherals to my monitor port adaptors thus shifting their power source away from my computer PSU. There's also the fact that I have NEVER gotten an error message log of any kind concerning this failure to boot and once I'm in the desktop environment everything is perfectly stable... no unexpected system crashes, no software glitches, no system temperature warnings, no hardware mysteriously becoming unavailable... nothing at all.
The only precursor to this issue that I ever noted started in August, about two months before I upgraded to Win10. In July I had taken my computer with me to New England and after I returned home I started having some problems when I closed down for the night and put the system in "sleep" mode. Sleep mode is supposed to store the active session and put the whole machine into a lower power state from which it can be awoken quickly by tapping the mouse or keyboard. Well, in August I started seeing the computer wake up on its own five or ten minutes after I put it to sleep. What's worse is that when I got up to tell the computer to go back to sleep it would do so but 50% of the time when I tried waking up the machine in the morning I would find that it failed to "sleep" and instead crashed and I was now booting it up from a blank slate. It wasn't long before I couldn't get it to go to sleep at all, -the system would attempt to go into "sleep" mode with the screens going dark but the system still chugging away like normal endlessly. Perhaps the system would eventually shut off but it actually had crashed. I ended up just shutting the whole thing down every night instead of using sleep mode since that worked properly. I had high hopes that upgrading to Win10 would fix this sleep mode problem, but no, I still have to shut down every night, and now I have the added problem of potentially finding that I can't reboot reliably in the morning.
Color me frustrated. My normal procedure now is to turn on the computer in the morning and cross my fingers that it works properly. If it doesn't then I disconnect things and reconnect until I get it working and then I cross my fingers that I don't have to reboot anymore during the day.
So... after all this, -does anyone have any ideas?
Please forgive me for the long-winded nature of the post as I haven't proof-read it, I just need to put it out there to see what sort of comments I could get so that I don't lose more time as a result. Thanks in advance for any help that could be offered.
About three weeks ago I upgraded my OS from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Prior to this the Windows 10 analysis said that there was only one thing that was a potential compatability problem with my PC but that was related to a wifi protocol built into my motherboard which research on the ASUS forum suggested wasn't going to be an issue according to the people who had been running Win10 previews. I let my PC upgrade and it went through several reboots to fully complete the process and when it was done I went about continuing my illustration work. Then I shut the computer down and spent the next day out of town. When I attempted to turn on my computer the following Monday I was greeted with the BIOS screen showing the usual stuff, then I saw the new Microsoft Windows logo and suddenly my PC just powers off. Normally I would see the Windows logo and a little spinning series of dots rotating in a circle to indicate that the OS is loading, but no dots appeared... no error screen or warning alert either, just *poof*, -the system shut down.
I tried rebooting several times and the problem repeated exactly as above. At that point I started troubleshooting. I started by disconnecting USB peripherals and monitors in an attempt to remove potential boot up obstacles from the process. I encountered some success there, -with all the peripherals save for the mouse and keyboard removed and only one monitor I could boot up to Windows 10. Once back into the OS environment however I saw no error messages or logs to indicate that anything had interrupted the previous boot up attempts. Ordinarily if Windows fails to load the following boot up attempt will be pre-empted with a warning at the bios level telling you something happened and do you want to instead try booting Windows into "safe" mode in order to diagnose the problem. Nothing like that happened here. In fact once I was in the desktop environment everything was working just fine; all programs were working like normal, the wifi connection was established and no hardware difficulties were found.
HOWEVER, despite everything working fine when I then rebooted in order to reconnect all the various peripherals and monitors I found that the same problem occurred again: power - bios display - windows logo - power shutdown. What's more confusing though is that when I attempted to reconfigure the hardware in the same manner as it had previously booted up with a removal of all USB peripherals and only one monitor then the system failed to boot. I then tried disconnecting all the hard drives save for the boot up and I got it to boot up, but not consecutively. At this point I started panicking and called my motherboard manufacture to see what could be done.
The motherboard manufacture (ASUS) advised that I try updating all the drivers for the motherboard to Windows 10 compatability, and that was about as far as they could go. Fortunately I was able to haphazardly get the system to boot up and found that there really wasn't many drivers I needed to get, but after updating things I still wasn't getting consistent boot ups. Next I tried calling Microsoft.
Microsoft had me talking to them extensively. They advised that I check for all new drivers for everything on my system to insure Win10 compatability. Unfortunately it was taking so long for me to successfully boot back into the desktop environment that there was concern the OS install might be faulty. Microsoft had me attempt to crash the system during the boot process in order to somehow trigger safe mode activation, but it just wasn't happening. We went so far as to create a new boot up USB flash disk and changed the BIOS boot order so that we could get some kind of diagnostic process going, but this effort produced no results, -the Win10 tool couldn't fix any problems. Just as we were about to attempt a complete reinstall via the USB boot process I was able to get back into the desktop through some random alignment of the stars, and I immediately began the process of finding every last Win10 driver and update available. At THIS point I actually started getting some consecutive reboots to work and I was able to resume my normal work on the system.
Unfortunately I'm STILL not able to get my computer to start up reliably. I shut down my computer overnight and at least twice a week when I turn it on in the morning it won't come on. Usually unplugging USB peripherals will do the job, but this morning that didn't do it and that's why I'm now turning to the internet to see if someone can make a guess about what the hell is happening. I had been wondering if the problem might be related to an overtaxed power supply considering that when after a boot failed I would try again with USB peripherals removed, but the thing is that I've got a 1050 watt PSU that should be overkill for my needs, -and prior to installing Win10 I never had an issue like this before. I'm still having the occasional boot failure even after moving some of my USB peripherals to my monitor port adaptors thus shifting their power source away from my computer PSU. There's also the fact that I have NEVER gotten an error message log of any kind concerning this failure to boot and once I'm in the desktop environment everything is perfectly stable... no unexpected system crashes, no software glitches, no system temperature warnings, no hardware mysteriously becoming unavailable... nothing at all.
The only precursor to this issue that I ever noted started in August, about two months before I upgraded to Win10. In July I had taken my computer with me to New England and after I returned home I started having some problems when I closed down for the night and put the system in "sleep" mode. Sleep mode is supposed to store the active session and put the whole machine into a lower power state from which it can be awoken quickly by tapping the mouse or keyboard. Well, in August I started seeing the computer wake up on its own five or ten minutes after I put it to sleep. What's worse is that when I got up to tell the computer to go back to sleep it would do so but 50% of the time when I tried waking up the machine in the morning I would find that it failed to "sleep" and instead crashed and I was now booting it up from a blank slate. It wasn't long before I couldn't get it to go to sleep at all, -the system would attempt to go into "sleep" mode with the screens going dark but the system still chugging away like normal endlessly. Perhaps the system would eventually shut off but it actually had crashed. I ended up just shutting the whole thing down every night instead of using sleep mode since that worked properly. I had high hopes that upgrading to Win10 would fix this sleep mode problem, but no, I still have to shut down every night, and now I have the added problem of potentially finding that I can't reboot reliably in the morning.
Color me frustrated. My normal procedure now is to turn on the computer in the morning and cross my fingers that it works properly. If it doesn't then I disconnect things and reconnect until I get it working and then I cross my fingers that I don't have to reboot anymore during the day.
So... after all this, -does anyone have any ideas?
No relevant entries in the Event Viewer?