I finally believe I figured out what has been going on with this laptop. It started with the September cummulative update of Windows 10. BSOD, Blue Screen of Death, the most annoying error of all. Apparently, it is Windows 10.
Product not tested for Windows 10 upgrade
Dell is not testing or developing Windows 10 drivers for this product. If you choose to upgrade, some features, applications, and connected devices may not work as expected.
I found this guy's site to be very helpful in finding the solution, which is ultimately reformmating the hard drive and putting Windows 7 back on it. That means starting all over with another computer, so it'll take some time to record every program I want to install on the new computer. I might try this and other troubleshooting tips when I get a new computer and can experiment on this one. until then, I tread very carefully.
The BSOD Critical Process Died happens consistently when I let the laptop idle for more than five minutes. It may be some corrupted files or incompatibility with some sleep setting or screensaver setting or hard drive setting. I adjuested the settings I could adjust and suspect it is a hard drive, BIOS, or Kaspersky software incompatibility with the latest Wondows 10 drivers, but I am just guessing. this reddit conversation seems to support the sleep setting issue.
I manually put the computer into sleep mode when I walk away for more than a few minutes and that seems to help, though I have not tested and repeated it scientifically just yet. The pain is I can't just leave the computer on and open waiting for emails which sucks while doing a job search.
I decided to try some of the suggestions on this site because they are windows command prompts and do not appear to be a hidden sales pitch or an installation of software not already part of Windows. I am running sfc/scandisk now. I've just got to wait and keep the computer active so the crash will not interrupt.
Sfc/scannow takes a while and I am nodding off while waiting, Sat up because nodding off means the computer will likely crash and interrupt scan. Also, the bladder wants emptying. Yes, the toils and troubles (and trials and tribulations, don't forget those) of the techie at work. I shall risk a trip to the potty (the technical term, you know, cuz I am getting all geeked out now).
Returning to the laptop, all is continuing. It withstood me stepping away for approximately 48.62 seconds. I see that the verification phase is 91% complete. Tic tic tic... ok, done. Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity errors. Time to get bolder and dive deeper into my potential tech geekiness.
So I move on to try Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth and see what happens. I says "No component store corruption detected. The operation completed successfully"
So I move on to Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth which returns the same message, nothing wrong, nothing to see here. I still move on to Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth just to finish the process. Another 15 or more minutes to fuddle about. Hopefully my use of technical jardon like fuddle and potty are not going too far over your head and making this record of the progress of the process an unpleasant experience for you. I'd offer you some refreshements, but you still have not gotten here. I did invite you over in one of these entries, after all. Even if you are not all geeked out or a film afficianado, you are more than welcome, you are encouraged to attend.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, as I was reading still more about the issues Windows 10 users are having, the Command Prompt screen tells me that "The restore operation completed successfully. The operation completed successfully. so whatever it did, it was successful. Apparently twice. yes, that is techie sarcasm. So where to go from here? I can simply test the computer by walking away for 10 minutes and seeing if the blue screen happens, but before that I will check a few other things. Like the sleep and hibernation settings.
Well, I will come back to sleep and hinernation settings because the command prompt powercfg -hibernation off gives me a respense of invalid parameters. The command prompt screen then tells me to try /? for help and the response to that prompt is '/?' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. There does not appear to be a way to ask the command prompt window why it suggests something that isn't there. Microsoft, yeah.
Checking Device Manager shows me that all of my drivers are up to date.
Moving on to checking the hard drives, the simple check done by right clicking on the drive, going to the tools menu, and clicking Check Drive showed no errors on any of my drives. I chose to folow up by optimizing the drive and during that process, another BSOD appeared with the same Critical Process Died message. So all the morning work noted in this entry did not stop the BSOD.
I turned the laptop off and started it up again and it started up just fine, which is the recent positive news as for a few weeks it was not starting up fine. At times I would hear a beep or two or three or four, indicators of various types of failures from disk to memory. I included that information in an entry somewhere. I would have to shut it down with the power button and try again, sometimes a few times, before a good boot would happen. The past few days, that has not been the case. Maybe Windows 10 upgrades are fixing the issues and Microsoft is doing their usual poor communication about the poor product updates. It's like a car company putting out a new model that crashes and then fixing the problems with the model when you take it in for service without telling you there was a problem and you are lucky your new model hasn't crashed before the first or next scheduled service.
Anyway, I am going to download Seagate Tools to check the hard drives because Dell support told me the internal hard drive was going to crash at any moment after they wan some test and I suspect they were just trying to sell me a new computer or charge me $149 to replace the hard drive.
And there it is, the Seagate Tools found that the hard drive failed. Another BSOD happened as I was letting it scan the drive while I was reading more information on the Seagate page. It recommends a complete back up before proceeding further and that is what I am doing now, using the Seagate software I downloaded from the website. I didn't install the software that came on the drive because I rarely do, but I will install that too and see if it is any different. The backup is in progress, I think, though I have no idea what is being backed up. The software says it will do it continuously as I update files, which is exactly what I want. I think. lol... so much to learn.
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