Post-boot freeze Win10

Double Bizzy · May 9, 2016

I've been on a LTT YouTube watching binge lately, and realized after a few of them that maybe someone on this forum might actually have the knowledge to help me with a situation.

I tried posting over at tenforums and no dice. Ten Forums "post boot freeze"

The basics are this: I have an ASUS G73JH laptop. I replaced the hard drive with an ADATA SP550 SSD. I did a clean install of Win10 x64 (used the windows media creation tool, burnt an iso to a cd, etc.) Over and over, at some point I get the computer freezing upon bootup. The earliest it happens is the spinning dots at the user name, the latest it happens is about 30 seconds after the desktop appears.

If you go look at that post, you'll see the laundry list of things / reasons I've eliminated, as well as suggestions that have gone nowhere (e.g., update the SATA AHCI driver, except that I can't really go past intel's 12.9 version because that was gen5 corresponding with the HM55 chipset on this machine. I specifically gave a screenshot of ones 6th gen or newer asking if I should update and got no response. I don't think that would be a good idea to just update the driver to a newer gen without some explanation / reasoning. Or the suggestions to update some other drivers through device manager, some of which I cannot even find like "AMD AHCI Compatible Controller driver" because I don't have anything AMD installed on this.) I even thought it was my nearly dead battery somehow confusing the computer and causing issues, buying a brand new battery and thinking for a few days that fixed it only to find out this morning I was wrong.

I have found a workaround. When the freeze happens, I restart, when desktop appears quickly go into start menu and shift+restart before another freeze, go to safe mode, go into system configuration and disable most of the non-microsoft services (adobe acrobat updater, amd external events utility again don't know why that's even there, google update services gupdate and gupdatem, canon inkjet printer, macrium reflect image mounting, skype updater, steam client service - I leave asus' asldr and atkgfnex enabled because those do keyboard backlighting and Fn+volume control). Also, go to task manager > startup tab and disable (showbatterybar, realtek audio, logitech download assistant, google drive (2), canon, and OneDrive. Then restart normally and everything is fine. Then go back into sysconfig and task manager and re-enable all those things and restart normally and it will be fine anywhere from a few hours to several days.

Anyway, if you have any thoughts, feel free to suggest. At this point, I'm starting to think it's just trying to put an SSD on something as old as HM55 chipset is going to have issues. And as long as this "simple" workaround succeeds, I might just have to live with it until I can afford a new machine.

Carrotjuice · May 9, 2016

Have you tried a fresh installed Windows 10, without any stuff?

I don't think that acrobat, or a printer driver can cause freezing, I think the problem would be drivers that have nothing to do with your system. Putting SSD on HM55 is probably not a problem at all (as long as you are running last BIOS), 'cause I once installed SSD on my old Pentium 4 PC and it worked fine. (Sorry, if I recommended sth that you tried, haven't seen the post in other forum, don't really have time right now for that.)

Double Bizzy · May 13, 2016

Yeah, I had fresh installed Win10 a number of times over the course of 2 weeks and eventually found that the freezes would happen even before I got other programs installed.

I think I may have possibly found a solution with the power / battery. So this laptop is notorious for having a problem where the charging / battery mess up when plugged in and the light starts flashing green to orange and the computer can't actually tell how much battery is left. The solution is unplugging and removing the battery and holding the power button down a few seconds to, I guess, release power from a capacitor or something somewhere. Anyway, it usually acts normal for several days after that.

Well, I also thought something similar could be happening with the freezes. For the last several days, I only start the laptop with battery and don't plug it in until Windows desktop appears. Haven't had a freeze yet. So we'll see if that trend continues for several more days / weeks and then I'll be pretty confident it's a power / battery issue... that I'll never be able to solve:/ but at least I can prevent the whole series of disabling / enabling services.