This is basically the screen I have been looking at all week. infamous BSOD ( black screen of death) With only the mouse cursor on screen.
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Also this is a screen it got constantly stuck on during shutdown. well it is not necessarily a bad thing, it definitely was not "normal" to my particular setup in getting stuck there.
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The odd thing is that if I did control alternate delete to bring up task manager, it would often then proceed to shut down normally as if something was becoming "un-stuck" during the switch.
After restoring the backup last night everything is working fine again
I have removed Samsung magician fully as that was suspect previously. I have also disabled the majority of services on start-up which I deemed not really necessary. Some seem to turn themselves back on but nothing much.
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Interesting thing about my boot up this morning is my windows now says " preparing desktop" as opposed to just a regular welcome screen. it is at that point normally hangs for a while before going to the black screen. I noticed this morning that my NAS drive had powered down ( standby) and it was again stuck on the preparing desktop until I heard the NAS spin up and it then went to desktop as normal.
There was some updates for the NAS drive , so I have installed them as well in case that was causing some problems. Also uninstalled some drivers and software which were dating back to like 2012 era. Stuff like "AMD catalyst control centre" driving was to bring dating back to my very old ATI based cards.
I also stumbled across this program. Will attach the programs below in case they disappear at some point.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/downlo ... scan-tool/
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It basically scans the error logs and lists them more conveniently. There was not really much in the way of errors other than several entries moaning that the search file indexes were corrupted. A couple other bizarro messages that I don't think are relevant to anything. There was A fairly long list moaning about some knowledgebase fixes which cannot update without extended Windows 7 support. So I basically ignoring them. They only seemed to be relating to Microsoft Edge anyway.
Shutting down my PC seems to be extremely quick again now. starting up also seems very quick. so basically the only things I have really changed on services which are running when Windows starts. but I don't really think there is anything much there anyway..
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Samsung magician was in there obviously has been removed now. my best guess is it was that which was causing the problems.
The phenomtweaker I don't believe was enabled (or installed even) . I think some of those programs which are listed in start-up are not even installed any more. Have not yet had time to figure out how to remove invalid items from that list.
I think the only likely candidate was again that Samsung magician program and possibly the creative audio drivers. but I don't see why the drivers would load as I don't have the creative card in my PC anymore..
Incidentally this is the faulty Memtest V5. Which annoyingly led me down the rabbit hole
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The new version is a lot more posh! and works!!!
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Also the results of the tests in Linux.
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Still don't really understand what changed with all this. Because my PC had been working perfectly for literally years ( aside from a year or two ago when my motherboard "died") . Again I did download Microsoft Office updates which could have been where the problems started from. I don't get why those would specifically cause problems with the system to start with.
I have also currently turned off a setting in antivirus, but I don't believe it was relating.. Because I disabled basically everything in the antivirus previously and it did not solve the start-up problems. But anyway, In was it always scans new files, but it does not allow access to them until they have been proven safe.. Now if the Internet connection is not working at that point it is entirely possible windows could lock up.But as turning of the antivirus did not seem to change anything then I don't believe it is relating currently.
Because there is a lot of unknowns going on, I am not changing anything for the time being.I don't think it is a driver problem or hardware problems because generally if I press reset when it got stuck I could often boot into Windows perfectly well afterwards. it would seemingly always boot perfectly well into safe mode as well. Also using " last known good configuration" also seemed to help a lot. but because the fall seems mostly intermittent it is difficult to tell what works and what doesn't. but if the last known good configuration worked, what changed to make it not work afterwards....
I have ran error checking on my C: drive, defragged and now currently making constant backups and verifying them to make sure there are no issues. At one point I thought it was acting up because the Linux drive was plugged in, though when I could not boot into windows, I unplugged the drive and left it out, but the problem still persisted anyway.
There is a load of other stuff I have been doing but not really noteworthy. just generally tidying up my windows install trying to eliminate possible points of failure. I hold my breath every time I turn on my PC now waiting for the black screen to return
