I’m recording this in case it happens to others.
Yesterday, Windows 11 began to hang. Not in the traditional sense where everything froze. I had about a minute where things worked. I could open Vivaldi and Eudora, and within those I could still do some things. Eudora was pretty stable, which is a sign of how good software was in 2007, while some of the already-open tabs on Vivaldi were still active, but any new tabs would not load.
In fact, that was how I stumbled on the bug yesterday.
I had a Teams meeting on Tuesday and after that, Teams would load on start-up for the next two days, something I never set the program to do. During Thursday I took it out of the start-up programs, and began poking around in there, finding things for Microsoft Office (superfluous, since I don’t even have it) and other software.
But when, after many hours, things stopped working, I began to troubleshoot. You can read the entire arduous process on Mastodon, with help from some caring netizens.
What was interesting was Discord and Signal no longer loaded since the bug surfaced.
I tried Safe Mode, which was stable, so I began suspecting the drivers. There was a single restore point. That was all fine, and the system was functioning for the half-hour I gave myself before I went to bed.
I thought that was the last of it till I woke up and encountered the same issue. The computer would be fine for about a minute. In that time I had to do what I could, rapidly, which was to get it rebooted into safe mode (right-click on the Windows start logo, Settings, System, then look for Recovery in the right-hand column).
After looking through the start-up programs over and over again, I couldn’t see anything that was causing the problem. Then it dawned on me: I had a minute to do everything. That meant it was something starting up after the boot sequence. Three little icons (out of 16 or so) came up in the system tray, so something out of those programs was doing something.
I’ve no idea how to get into the folder where the system tray programs reside. However, the Reliability Monitor was one clue: there were more crashes with the AMD driver (hence suspicion went there), but today there were a few crashes from Asus ROG Armoury Crate.
I tried troubleshooting the AMD drivers with some difficulty, and its clean-up tool didn’t fix things.
After suspecting a lot of other software, I investigated Asus’s programs on my PC. The mouse that the software came with is dead, so why was I still keeping this?
It was indeed ROG Armoury Crate at fault. I don’t know why it decided to be a pain in the proverbial, and sadly it took well into day two before I began suspecting it. Once removed, things were starting to come back to normal (for now; don’t stop thinking about tomorrow). Some things wouldn’t open (Notepad, Windows Updates) which were repaired with an admin command prompt and SFC /scannow, and WordPerfect was so destroyed through all of this that it had to be reinstalled.
If only more mouse manufacturers did mice of a proper size. I wouldn’t have needed to get the Asus mouse (at NZ$75!) and I wouldn’t have had accompanying, faulty software that cost me two days, in a week when I can ill afford to lose time. I’ve also been thwarted by a Wordpress plug-in that’s meant to connect us to a supplier, and that’s cost a week of sales. I’m told that that particular company is flat out with their program having become very popular, so they struggle to do tech support for everyone.
The silver linings are having had to make a new back-up, found Avira had stopped and removed the antivirus part of the programme (and remedying that after years, apparently), and finding a lot of the good from netizens on Mastodon.
I see Windows is ready to install 23H2. Dare I?
I’ve wasted enough time already so why not? It’ll take a few hours to configure in the morning. Presuming the fix worked and I am not limited to one-minute (if that) sessions. After the IT week from hell, maybe I should get it over and done with.
You may also like
