SP4 Has Been Freezing Up for the Last Month or So.

[DavidZ]

I've owned my SP4 since it first came out in late 2015. I lived through the difficult early days until Microsoft finally fixed the software to make it more stable. It's been working great for the last 4 years or so with only the occasional crash. Also, the battery only lasts about a hour.

Lately it's been freezing up at random. Sometimes it'll work for 5 minutes and sometimes it works for 30 minutes. When it freezes, the screen looks normal, but none of the buttons work. And the scrolling is like molasses. It started doing this right after some large updates were installed about a month ago. Rebooting fixes it.

I Googled it, but haven't found anything directly on point. Some hits points to the drivers being out-of-date or obsolete. However, I don't want to start down that path unless I have a pretty good sense that the drivers are, in fact, causing the problem.

Any suggestions?

 

[sharpuser]

Sometimes, the sequence in which drivers load up when you reboot is important for stability. You don’t have control over this, except to have Windows do the configuring. So driver updates may have made the sequence not optimum.

I suggest a Windows Reset, “Keep my files” option. That should set up your drivers and internal settings in the right order. If you choose to do this, please let us know the result.

 

[DavidZ]

Thanks, sharpuser.

Are there any less drastic strategies to try before that one? Are you certain of your diagnosis? If not, is there any way to definitively diagnose the problem before taking action?

 

[sharpuser]

Not certain. Only a track record of persons who did this reset to fix apparently driver updates, often had the issues resolved.

The process takes about 10 minutes.