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Computers

In An Emergency, Don’t Break Windows 10 by GF Willmetts.

You should read and hardcopy this piece for emergencies.

Last night, Windows 10 decided unannounced to do an update, even when it was in sleep mode. Unfortunately, once past the restart and password, all I got was a black screen. Well, that and a ‘Personalised Settings’ announcing that it wasn’t working.

Ctr/Alt/Delete revealed the Taskmaster but that didn’t change anything neither.

I rebooted several times by hard reboot by pressing down on the power button but that didn’t change this neither.

Now, before you run off to your local computer shop, try this.

You will get the option for starting W10 regardless which we know won’t work or the Troubleshooter option which can take forever. However, it does give an option to turn off the computer, which as we know, is the standard practice with anything not functioning. Don’t forget that a restart doesn’t necessarily turn everything off. So choose this option as it will turn off anything operational in the right order.

Start the computer as for normal and wait for the dial circle and such to the main W10 page and password and, this time, the normal W10 screen should finally appear. If it stalls now, a simple reboot will sort the rest out. Give a few minutes for W10 to sort itself out. I found turning on a program but waiting for it to start works as well as a stopwatch.

At least this works.

I hope this is only a problem with laptops and not desktop computers and if anyone has experienced a similar problem and come up with a different solution, please write in with your solution.

What I find annoying is M/S is doing this kind of update without any kind of warning and not even getting W10 to resolve the problem.

GF Willmetts

UncleGeoff

Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 21 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’ If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.

2 thoughts on “In An Emergency, Don’t Break Windows 10 by GF Willmetts.

  • What you probably got was an out-of-band patch for a couple of nasty processor vulnerabilities. One was specific to recent Intel chips but does not affect AMD CPUs. The other is more broadly based. The CPU bugs can result in memory leaks and potential exposure of private information. There’s a corresponding set of patches released for the Linux kernel. Look up Meltdown and Spectre for details.

    MS apparently decided it was serious enough to force the patch on everyone. You’re the first one I’ve seen reporting a problem with Win10 as an aftermath of the patch.

    As an alternative, if you can get to task manager, File/Run new task should let you run a CMD process and get to a command line. From the command line, you can run a shutdown command. (Type “shutdown /?” at a command line to get help on the command and see the available options.

    Power cycling does not do a graceful shutdown, properly terminating processes, so no surprise you had issues after doing that.
    ______
    Dennis

    Reply
    • Hello Dennis
      My back-up computer is AMD so will be able to run the comparison today, assuming it wants to download it.
      With the problem I had last night and working out how to get around it made me think I ought to say something quickly than see the panic.
      The Task Master gave no option to turn off the computer. I did consider pulling the battery, which has worked in the past, but the current version of my Dell laptop doesn’t give easy access to it. For those who are considering that option, you need to unplug the laptop from the electricity supply, pull the releases for the battery on the base, leave it out for a couple minutes, put it back in, reconnect if you use electricity and reboot. Sometimes, that will work but it will certainly do no overall harm, especially if you’ve rebooted W10 a few times. Luckily, W10 does store back-up files of anything you were working on prior to the update.
      I think the biggest problem was getting it to shutdown properly. Something it wasn’t doing in Restart mode, suggesting something was either not turning off or a software switch hadn’t closed properly.
      If only 1% of the Windows users have this problem, that’s still a lot of people. I still think M/S should issue a warning to what it is doing. It has a process for doing that with major updates so its hardly something new that they should be doing.
      Geoff

      Reply

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