M
Michael_Grant
For several months, perhaps close to a year now I have been experiencing this issue with my desktop where for no particular reason, Windows sort of half freezes up and the only thing I can do is hard power off to reboot.
I'm currently in the Windows Insider program on the Beta build.
Here's what I'm currently running:
Edition Windows 10 Pro
Version 20H2
Installed on 11/12/2019
OS build 19042.546
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.31.0
Motherboard Asus X99-Deluxe II Motherboard (Socket 2011-3/X99/DDR4/S-ATA 600/ATX)
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz 3.30 GHz
Installed RAM 64.0 GB
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display
Here's what's happening. Under no particular circumstances, all of a sudden, things start to get a little slow then Windows gets into a strange state which is characterized as follows:
1. If I close a app by clicking the red X, the window goes away but the task in the task bar remains.
2. I can still get to the Windows start menu but nothing starts
3. From the start menu, if I try to reboot, it seems to start to reboot, closing down the open windows, the background goes to black, but it get stuck and won't reboot and no way to do anything at this point and I have to hard power off.
4. I have managed to start the task manager using ctrl-shift-escape and one by one tried killing off processes to see if some process has thing stuck but no luck. No process is taking up a lot of CPU, disk, or memory, the machine seems mostly idle.
5. Using the task manager as above, trying to restart Windows Explorer again results in the background going black and the task bar going away and no way to do anything except hard power off the machine.
6. After the power cycle, it always reboots without issue but no indication of what happened.
7. If I'm editing a file at the time this happens, I lose my work up to when things went wonky. If I'm composing a mail message in Windows 10 Mail, it doesn't save a draft. If I try saving a file in Notepad++, not only won't it save, but Notepad++ loses it's sessions.xml file so any open tabs are gone next time I open it! Basically, the safest thing I have found when I notice Windows getting into this state is not even to try to reboot cleanly but to immediately hard power off the machine.
8. When it gets into this state, it seems like Windows is no longer writing to the disk. It almost seems like it can't even write some log message telling me what went wrong.
I have checked my disk for bad blocks and consistency, no errors found, everything healthy there. Memory also tests good. Virus scans come up clean. No relation to heat either. No relation to time, can happen several times a day, or not for a week or so.
I have tried to do a Windows in-place reinstall to reinstall windows back to the current non-insider release but apparently since I'm on the beta build, it requires me to delete everything--something that I would greatly prefer not to do. If someone can give me a clue how to move back to a standard build, perhaps I can then do an in-place reinstall and see if that helps?
This has persisted for months through many insider builds and it's not clear to me that this is related to the insider build or some other problem. I have searched for others who have similar problems but it's not so easy to search for these weird symptoms! Hence my post here, hopefully someone else has also had a similar issue or can tell me how I can get more info on what's going on.
Michael Grant
Continue reading...
I'm currently in the Windows Insider program on the Beta build.
Here's what I'm currently running:
Edition Windows 10 Pro
Version 20H2
Installed on 11/12/2019
OS build 19042.546
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.31.0
Motherboard Asus X99-Deluxe II Motherboard (Socket 2011-3/X99/DDR4/S-ATA 600/ATX)
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz 3.30 GHz
Installed RAM 64.0 GB
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display
Here's what's happening. Under no particular circumstances, all of a sudden, things start to get a little slow then Windows gets into a strange state which is characterized as follows:
1. If I close a app by clicking the red X, the window goes away but the task in the task bar remains.
2. I can still get to the Windows start menu but nothing starts
3. From the start menu, if I try to reboot, it seems to start to reboot, closing down the open windows, the background goes to black, but it get stuck and won't reboot and no way to do anything at this point and I have to hard power off.
4. I have managed to start the task manager using ctrl-shift-escape and one by one tried killing off processes to see if some process has thing stuck but no luck. No process is taking up a lot of CPU, disk, or memory, the machine seems mostly idle.
5. Using the task manager as above, trying to restart Windows Explorer again results in the background going black and the task bar going away and no way to do anything except hard power off the machine.
6. After the power cycle, it always reboots without issue but no indication of what happened.
7. If I'm editing a file at the time this happens, I lose my work up to when things went wonky. If I'm composing a mail message in Windows 10 Mail, it doesn't save a draft. If I try saving a file in Notepad++, not only won't it save, but Notepad++ loses it's sessions.xml file so any open tabs are gone next time I open it! Basically, the safest thing I have found when I notice Windows getting into this state is not even to try to reboot cleanly but to immediately hard power off the machine.
8. When it gets into this state, it seems like Windows is no longer writing to the disk. It almost seems like it can't even write some log message telling me what went wrong.
I have checked my disk for bad blocks and consistency, no errors found, everything healthy there. Memory also tests good. Virus scans come up clean. No relation to heat either. No relation to time, can happen several times a day, or not for a week or so.
I have tried to do a Windows in-place reinstall to reinstall windows back to the current non-insider release but apparently since I'm on the beta build, it requires me to delete everything--something that I would greatly prefer not to do. If someone can give me a clue how to move back to a standard build, perhaps I can then do an in-place reinstall and see if that helps?
This has persisted for months through many insider builds and it's not clear to me that this is related to the insider build or some other problem. I have searched for others who have similar problems but it's not so easy to search for these weird symptoms! Hence my post here, hopefully someone else has also had a similar issue or can tell me how I can get more info on what's going on.
Michael Grant
Continue reading...