Why Your Computer Freezes at Startup – Solutions Here

It’s happened to us all before. It may be the start of your day and you turn your computer on. Without thinking twice, you go and grab yourself a cup of brew or do some other task that will give your computer time to boot up. When you come back to your machine you find that it is either frozen or has just simply shut down. You then proceed to ask yourself – Why did my Computer Freeze at Startup?

When your computer freezes at startup or fails to load windows, it is typically either a hardware issue, a corrupt driver, or a bad operating system file. The most important thing to to when trying to fix this issue is to find the source or cause of the problem. It’s normally a process of elimination.

Here are some very important steps to take if your computer is freezing during startup:

• The first thing you should try is to boot up using what is called “Last Known Good Configuration“. In order to do this, you need to turn your computer on and start to hit the F8 key right away. Hit it continuously until you see the Advanced Boot Menu. You will see a list of different boot up options. Select ‘Last Known Good Configuration”. I would say that this works around 80 – 85 percent of the time. If you computer boots up, then you need to either uninstall the new piece of hardware you installed or the driver that is causing the issue. You may also want to scan your machine for Spyware or Malware.
• If ‘Last Know Good Configuration” doesn’t work, then you should repeat the same process as shown above to access the Advanced Boot Menu. This time, you will select Safe Mode. After a large list of files scrolls down your screen, your desktop should load up. If it does, then we are driving home the fact that the issue is most likely due to an invalid driver or a corrupt registry key.
• If your machine still does not boot in safe-mode, then you are looking at either a hardware or operating system issue. If you have recently added a piece of hardware to your computer then you may want to remove it and see if it boots. Another really good step to take is to unplug or disconnect any hardware that is not needed at boot. So what you could do is pop open the tower and disconnect things such as your CD-ROM, Floppy Drive, Modem, Network Card, and etc… You may also want to re-seat the RAM, CPU, and Video Card.
• If none of the above options work, then you should try a Windows Repair. Only do this if you have the Operating System CD that came with your computer. You want to make sure that you are not restoring the machine back to when you first bought it, but that you are simply repair the version of Windows you have installed. If you boot from the OS cd, you will see the options there to repair your windows installation. This method sometimes takes a little while, but it is usually effective and does its job without you losing any data and actually fixing the problems.

In the previous post, we learned what typically causes a computer freezes. In this post we covered some things you can do if your computer freezes at startup. I would highly recommend a great piece of software that will keep your drivers up to date and will also identify drivers that are outdated or corrupt. Click Here to check out Driver Checker.

~Cheers