My friends pc is having issues of no start functions working. The upgrade was from windows 7 ultimate and it as been working for 2 months very well but we reckon it might have happened since a major update. I think it's a software problem not hardware. Last night I refreshed his pc keeping all his files and settings and to no avail. System specs: AMD phenom 2 955 Asrock N68 GS 8 GB of DDR2 Corsair 750w. I have been in PowerShell and I have tried scanning for corrupt files using sfc /scannow after its verification it had found corrupt files and repaired them. Restarted but still the same. Tried this command from a thread in answers.microsoft Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"} Also have tried to create a new user account in control but pc just hangs. Thanks in advance
I had a very similar situation recently after running a variety of cleanup tools thru a laptop; I'd get the "Critical Error: Start Menu is not working" error and a prompt to log off and on again. It's a very common problem - well, that and its almost-identical counterpart message, "Cortana and Start aren't working". Nothing'd fix it - I tried Safe Mode, no difference, and couldn't make a new user account as the ms-settings panes wouldn't respond properly. In the end, a system restore back to before I ran the cleanup tools sorted it. I then had to do my entire cleanup again, being much more careful, and realised that it had happened because there were leftover bits of a McAfee installation still running (services and whatnot). That, plus a user attempt to install Norton over the top, PLUS my cleanup attempts with RogueKiller, MBAM, rkill, etc., caused the problem. So I ran the Norton & McAfee removal tools first, then all my tools, and everything was fine. If there hadn't been those restore points, I'd have had no choice but to do a Windows 10 Reset. . edit - IT WAS MCAFEE. There are many possible causes of this problem (Avast being installed across the upgrade process is another one) but in this case it was definitely McAfee, because I just reinstalled it for the customer and the same goddamn thing happened again. As I've previously moaned about, McAfee withholds the latest version of their products from OEM partner buyers, so if you get McAfee Security/Livesafe through HP, Lenovo or whatever, you're stuck one year behind. Unfortunately, last year's Livesafe doesn't seem to be W10 compatible. That doesn't stop the worthless P.O.S. from installing itself anyway, and bricking your OS, though. Thanks, McAfee! If your friend has McAfee, or has ever had McAfee, try to sys. restore back to before that, and run the MCPR removal tool. TL;DR: f**k McAfee to the moon and back.
This could be the problem through AOL/talk talk, I will find out when he gets back to me. When looking at his system last weekend he has got F secure on it but before that he did have mcafee, I don't know when he removed it and if he did it would have been Add/remove programs. The system restore I did didn't go back that far and didn't make any difference, the mcafee install might have been going back to last year and I think he did a fresh install of windows 7 just before windows 10 came out because of a HDD change due to a bad PSU. Just need to find out more detail thanks.
Np. For posterity, I had a w8 machine today stuck in an update loop and system restore to before the last batch of updates fixed it, so there's also something in the March updates for w8 that may cause this problem. It was McAfee again. It's always McAfee. It was the restart for Norton's installer's attempt to remove McAfee. A third machine, on w10, had the same problem yesterday and nothing would fix it, including system restore, so I'm now in the process of Resetting it. I don't know for a fact this one had McAfee on it, but I like to imagine it probably did.
Yes he used windows uninstaller, rather than do a clean install I think I may ask him to roll back to windows 7 and use the mcafee removal tool.
Have a look at the running services each step of the way, too, on the first of my two machines I found that about half of McAfee's standard 11 services/startup entries were still running. Some are removed on the restart, which I'm guessing is the whole problem - if anything else is happening on that restart (Windows Updates, another AV installation, an upgrade) they don't get removed.
The guy texted me tonight and he said he was in live chat with Microsoft and they said his profile was corrupt and they created a new profile. I tried that last weekend and the computer hung. He will be carrying out a clean install within the next 2 weeks, this tops it off for him with the hardware problems he's had over 2 years. I believe his built 3 systems since i've known him all AMD based, the first being socket A and the 2nd being AM2 then upgrading to AM3 with DDR2/DDR3 support. He may have had a Pentium system before he built his own, I think he was running windows 3.1 and I can always remember how he use to say how reliable the system was.
[off-topic] I've been trying to verify the various stability/reliability rumours between Intel and AMD for years, to be honest, and never found anything very concrete. Failure rates on the CPUs themselves are absolutely tiny, anomalous, even (who's really had a CPU fail in the last decade?) and systems seem to vary enormously. Still, the notion that AMD systems are inherently less reliable than Intel systems persists, particularly in the laptop sector. Even more annoyingly, I did actually observe the trend in my last job. Over the course of several hundred laptop failures and OEM desktop motherboard failures observed, a majority of all failures were AMD systems. This annoyed me, because I knew in principle that it couldn't be the CPUs themselves that were the problem, just as criminologists trying to explain ethnic disparities know it can't be race itself that's the determining factor. I have a simple explanation, however: because AMD are slightly cheaper per-chip, they're more frequently used in systems targetted at a lower average total price than similar Intel systems, and on those systems, other components (and indeed the OEM motherboards themelves) will tend to be cheaper. Basically, OEMs using AMD are trying to keep cost to a minimum, so AMD systems will be less reliable due to budgeting on other components than the CPU itself (most likely motherboards). In addition, one of the most common sources of failures and reliability problems in laptops is dedicated graphics chips, and Intel always partner up with Nvidia's mobile chips - and since the widely-publicized Nvidia defect court case, recalls and refunds in ~2007, Nvidia will probably have been making much more of an effort to improve the reliability and temperature tolerances of their mobile chips. By contrast, ATI/AMD's mobile chips have not been publicly disgraced and are therefore under less pressure to improve in that way. My own limited experience tallies strongly with this, and most of the graphics chip failures I've seen since 2007-8 have been AMD mobile GPUs rather than Nvidia. This might just be because AMD mobile GPUs are/were more widely and confidently used, and laptop OEMs have shied away from using Nvidia chips and leaned more on Intel's integrated on-die solutions since the defect case, of course, but the result is the same. Of course, custom-built systems, using premium branded motherboards and dedicated desktop GPUs, bypass both of these factors completely, and many tech enthusiasts have affirmed no recurring reliability problems with AMD systems or noticeable differences between them. If (if) you buy a decent desktop board, AMD should be no worse. [/off-topic]
