General Issues After Upgrading to Win11

[dday9]

I have a Dell Latitude 1500, which I absolutely love. I bought it, maybe 3-4 years ago, and it came with Windows 10 Pro.

The Win11 updates kept popping up, but I would ignore them every time. When I saw that Windows 10 was coming to end of life, I decided to update. The initial upgrade went smoothly, it was long, but smooth nonetheless. Since then, I have had several issues.

The primary issue being that the computer simply crashes with no specific error message, just that "something" went catastrophically wrong, and it had to reboot. The secondary issue is that maybe 3 out of 5 times it boots up, it cannot find a bootable device. If I go into the boot startup screen, I can see my hard drive, so I exit and it boots up. The third issue is that performance has completely plummeted, but not consistently. Sometimes, it will run just fine. Other times, the fan will speed up to "take off" mode, and it will take seconds to minutes to open applications.

This is an incredibly frustrating experience, and to top it off, I'm not really a "tech guy" in the IT sense. So, I don't really know what the heck I'm doing with all this hardware/OS crap.

[Steve R Jones]

Google AI Mode:

When Windows 11 throws a "catastrophic failure" (often a Black/Blue Screen of Death, update loop, or locked settings), it’s usually caused by a bad system update, a corrupted driver, or buggy background OEM software (like Dell/HP utilities).

Here is an actionable, step-by-step approach to get your system back to working order, starting with the least invasive fixes:

1. The Command Prompt Repair (If you can still reach your desktop/Start menu)

Corrupted system files are a massive culprit for these crashes. Running a built-in repair tool can quickly fix the OS.

Right-click the Start menu and select Terminal (Admin) or Command Prompt (Admin).

1. Type dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth and hit Enter (this connects to Windows Update to fix corrupted files).
2. Wait for it to finish, then type sfc /scannow and hit Enter (this scans for and repairs local file integrity).
3. Restart your computer

[jdc2000]

Check Event Viewer to see if there any errors that might be useful.

The big problem with Windows 11 is that it is still beta software. Microsoft is constantly changing things without testing the results, and they also update drivers often without any indication that they have done so. I would disable driver updating from Microsoft.

https://windowsforum.com/threads/how...-guide.361477/

[dday9]

I've attached a photo I took of the crash screen.

There's no events in the event viewer.

When I tried running the dism command, it took maybe 4 hours and eventually ended with:

Error: 0x800f0915

The repair content could not be found anywhere.
Check the internet connectivity or use the "Source" option to specify the location of the files that are required to restore the image. For more information on specifying a source location, see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=243077

The DISM log file can be found at C:\WINDOWS\Logs\DISM\dism.log

[dday9]

Update - I forgot to mention that the log was empty. However, rerunning the command a second time appeared to succeed with:

The restore operation completed successfully
The operation completed successfully.

Afterwards, I got a Dell Command | Update notification with:

The system has been updated.

I'm running the sfc command now. Stay tuned.

Edit - That was much quicker. I got this message after running the command:

Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them.
For online repairs, details are included in the CBS log file located at windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For example C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For offline repairs, details are included in the log file provided by the /OFFLOGFILE flag.

I guess at this point, Windows Update is showing that I'm up-to-date. I did upgrade all on winget which showed 23 upgrades available. I tried installing them, but my screen went completely blank with no warning, but the laptop appears to be on because the light for my mute button is lit up (which only happens when it has power and is on). I guess stay tuned for more.

[Steve R Jones]

I would try and grab the log files for future reference.

[dday9]

When I tried grabbing the first failure log, it was completely empty. The CBS log is not empty, but I'm not sure how to read it. I guess I can upload it to ChatGPT and see if it can make anything of it.