I've had trouble getting my laptop to boot all the way to a Windows log in prompt for over a week now. I walked in to the room earlier today and discovered the computer had restarted and got stuck on POST (the initial boot sequence before the computer even tried to load an operating system). The computer has hard-locked (though the cursor still moved, which was weird) several times tonight and it took 6-7 restarts to get it up and running long enough to back up data to an external drive. It's done the same several times before, but it usually starts behaving again after 3-4 restarts.
I'm going to try a wipe and clean install of Windows 10, but all evidence suggests the hard drive and OS are not at fault.
I really don't want to buy a new laptop right now. I might be able to get a decent one for a few hundred bucks, but it won't be able to run Guild Wars 2 or other games at a respectable image quality. To be fair, though, my 8-year old laptop isn't capable of running games from the last few years anyway and even struggles with Team Fortress 2 on anything higher than medium settings.
The onboard diagnostics didn't flag anything but the drive (which is probably a false positive because I don't think SSDs existed when this computer was built). Maybe I need to find a Linux distro that specializes in diagnostics and throw it on a thumbdrive...
I'm going to try a wipe and clean install of Windows 10, but all evidence suggests the hard drive and OS are not at fault.
I really don't want to buy a new laptop right now. I might be able to get a decent one for a few hundred bucks, but it won't be able to run Guild Wars 2 or other games at a respectable image quality. To be fair, though, my 8-year old laptop isn't capable of running games from the last few years anyway and even struggles with Team Fortress 2 on anything higher than medium settings.
The onboard diagnostics didn't flag anything but the drive (which is probably a false positive because I don't think SSDs existed when this computer was built). Maybe I need to find a Linux distro that specializes in diagnostics and throw it on a thumbdrive...
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