We only have one customer who is not a business.
They are the sweetest elderly couple and they’ve called us for years.
Today I had one of their computers in because it was blue screening. It’s a custom built machine that originally had Windows 7 on it but has since been upgraded to Windows 8 and then Windows 10. With an SSD hard drive, it usually runs pretty well .. until the day it got itself stuck in a reboot loop.
The problem with an SSD on an UEFI BIOS is the thing is just so fast to boot, you often can’t interrupt the process with F8 or Shift + F8 to see if you can get it to start in Safe Mode. Most of the Windows 10 blue screen reboot loops I’ve seen have been AMD graphic driver issues, so that’s what I incorrectly assumed with this one.
I should have gone with my logical troubleshooting skills, when the error read “Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. Attempted to write to readonly memory.”
Yes, that’s a pretty big clue right there. Memory.
Booting off a USB key with my favourite utilities and running Memtest86 confirmed it:
New RAM it is then. Sorry AMD.
And lesson learnt. Read the error messages.
-SCuffy