Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Windows 10 Upgrade - A Flashing Error Experience

So last night I decided to do the Windows 10 upgrade on the home computer.

All seemed to be going well, so I let it chug along upgrading overnight.

This morning it was ready and I logged in, turned off the reporting features that sends Microsoft all your activity data during the setup, hit continue, and drat.

The screen started flashing the desktop then black and continued to repeat the pattern and nothing would work nor could anything be done except ctrl-alt-delete.

I tried a reset and the same thing happened - once past the login screen the desktop would start and then continue flashing.

I tried a full power off and the same thing happened - once past the login screen the desktop would start and then continue flashing.

So with that computer out of action I searched for answers online using another machine.

It turns out the cure is to disable the Windows Error Reporting Service.

Yes, the irony is to be appreciated here - the Windows Error Reporting Service is itself the cause of a fatal error.

I followed the helpful instructions on that site, disabled the service and lo and behold, the computer now works 100%.

Overall, Windows 10 is very similar to Windows 7 so far, with some improvements, and it appears to be a bit faster booting up than Windows 7 which is a surprise.

Now that I'm past the error it seems to have been a worthy upgrade. We'll see as we test it more over the next while.

5 comments:

juvat said...

Aaron,
I'm assuming you've done the due diligence on the windows 10 Privacy issue. If not, you might want to Google it. But here's a decent starting point.

Aaron said...

juvat: Thanks, and yes I looked into the privacy matters before upgrading and did the initial privacy tweaks at the start of the upgrade.

Thanks for the link, its certainty useful I'm going to share it with other more base-line computer users I know who can use that to follow along and adjust their settings.

ProudHillbilly said...

Beats Windows 8, anyway.

ProudHillbilly said...

Beats Windows 8, anyway.

Aaron said...

PH: It most certainly does!