Windows 10 freezes seconds after first action

[amfanon]

My apartment suffered a power outage. My computer was behind a battery backup/surge protector, but after restarting it, it no longer works.

Now my computer will boot up, but will freeze moments after I do anything. The mouse will continue to move, but it turns into a spinning circle and nothing can be clicked on. For example:

I can boot to windows, log in, open a web browser and restore the previous session but if I chick on a tab it freezes.

I can boot to windows and then open windows explorer and look in a few folders...but if I try and do anything with a file then it freezes.

I can boot to windows login and tell it to restart in safe mode, but then it freezes and doesn't actually restart.

It's really hard to diagnose a possible when you can start the damn thing for more than a few seconds!

Please help!

 

[Allan10]

Hi amfanon,

As you know, nasty things can happen during a power outage. Quite often an outage is proceeded by a surge. This can damage your surge protection unit, and even get by it. If you did take a surge, hopefully it did its job and protected upstream. Lets test to see if perhaps the power backup unit was damaged.

Try this if you haven't already :

unplug your computer completely from the battery backup unit. While unplugged, press the power button repeatedly a few times. This will drain the last bits of power from your computer capacitors. Now plug directly into the wall. And then try and boot.

If this get further than you have, then you can assume something is shorted in your backup power unit.

Else: Can you boot from a startup disk? If the machine is stable ( doesn't freeze) , then perhaps you can run system repair, or system restore utilities.

Other members here may have some better suggestions so keep checking back.

cheers.

 

[amfanon]

Hi amfanon,

As you know, nasty things can happen during a power outage. Quite often an outage is proceeded by a surge. This can damage your surge protection unit, and even get by it. If you did take a surge, hopefully it did its job and protected upstream. Lets test to see if perhaps the power backup unit was damaged.

Try this if you haven't already :

unplug your computer completely from the battery backup unit. While unplugged, press the power button repeatedly a few times. This will drain the last bits of power from your computer capacitors. Now plug directly into the wall. And then try and boot.

If this get further than you have, then you can assume something is shorted in your backup power unit.

Else: Can you boot from a startup disk? If the machine is stable ( doesn't freeze) , then perhaps you can run system repair, or system restore utilities.

Other members here may have some better suggestions so keep checking back.

cheers.

Thanks for the response.

I drained the power and plugged it into the wall, no improvement, I'm afraid. I do not have boot media as this was an automatic upgrade from win 7 to win 10 through windows update.

 

[Allan10]

amfannon,

If you have a friend with Win 10, you can use his computer to create a system recovery CD from the backup/restore interface,. And also create a windows 10 install CD using Window 10 media creation tool.

Assuming there is no electrical damage to any of your hardware components, with luck, you should be able to recover your current install. But it would be piece of mind if you had backups of your system. Or at least backups of your data.

When you installed windows 10, you would have activated through their server which has registered your machine as a valid Windows 10 licensee. Even if you have to rebuild from scratch. But hopefully you will be able to repair and recover your current install complete with all applications and data.

Perhaps the registry got corrupted and all you will need to do is restore a previous system restore point to fix.

Anyway the first step is gathering the disks you need and then booting from the system repair disk. And choosing the repair options to see if that gets you up and running.

If that fails, then you should boot from the win 10 install disk, which may also offer a repair option. Failing that your next choice would be to choose an update current installation to avoid a reformat.

But lets see where you get with the repair disk first. There are others on this forum that do this type of stuff much more frequently than me. And are thus better to advise with the options I am suggesting here.

Hopefully they will chime in by the time you get your required media in hand.

cheers