Someone new contacted this week about their Windows10 laptop not finishing the Windows 10 load. The user would log into Windows successfully and then it got very slow never loading the desktop icons. If you clicked on anything,nothing happened and no error messages. It was about two years old, but a relatively inexpensive unit. 

When I got a hold of the laptop and started working on it, my first thought was to repair the Windows startup process. I ran startup repair which stated it couldn’t solve anything. Safe mode was tried next and to my amazement, the Windows desktop icons weren’t bashful and populated the screen!  I thought I was home free so I began checking and removing some startup programs and installed programs and the ant-virus software.

After a laptop restart, it was the same sluggish Windows 10. I restarted back in Safe Mode and checked some more things and found nothing wrong. I rebooted into the laptop’s diagnostics(before Windows loads) and ran a full check. It found the hard drive had a hardware error and this explains why it has major problems in normal mode, but runs better in Safe Mode. Safe Mode doesn’t require as many hard drive resources as normal mode. One of the drivers or system files was probably on the defective part of the hard drive and in Safe mode it wasn’t accessed so the computer seemed fine.  When normal mode was used, the defective part of the hard drive was used and this is where it slowed down.

The hard drive holds the operating system files, user files, registry, drivers and program files. If a hard drive is defective, it’s not wise to keep using it as it will only get worse. They can be replaced with anew one.

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