Starting in at least Dec, I began incurring crashes/shutdowns of my laptop while imaging with SGP. I get a blue screen and then the computer shuts downs and reboots. I also received a message one time “security colonel check failure”. Basically my unit may run an half hour or a few hours and then crash. In Jan, it crashed in cold conditions 3 times one night. Of course, I lost several hours imaging because I had to reset up everything after each crash. The laptop has not crashed while I use Photoshop at home at other times although I have not used it extensively for other purposes. It also never crashed before the install of the solid state drive.
Also, I read about the Windows Jan update and the ASCOM issue but my crashes started the month before at least.
A bit of background. This is a 2 year old HP Laptop Star Wars edition with Windows 10. I hired a 3rd party in Oct to put in a solid state drive and to increase RAM. He cloned ASCOM and SGP but is now wondering if that is the problem. He is proposing wiping my laptop clean and I will have to reinstall all my programming. Thoughts or suggestions?
Full reinstall of OS is a reasonable first step.
If crashes continue, you may have some hardware problems. You mention it crashed 3 times one night in cold conditions, but never crashes when you use in for other work. Is that other work in your house where it is warm? Could be a hardware sensitivity to cold. This might indicate a new pc is appropriate. The usual approach to a hardware problem is to replace components that are likely related to the problem. If it is a problem related to cold temps, I would be at a loss to single out any given component in the computer.
If you use it indoors without a problem and the problem only occurs when its cold outside, that is unusual as most computers run better when cold. However, I had a similar problem. I had assumed the computer was running on A/C because it was plugged in. However, the A/C was only charging the battery and in the cold weather the battery drained quicker than it could recharge. I finally solved the problem by putting a pet warmer under the PC. If its not related to cold weather than I agree with jmacon that reinstalling the OS is a good start.
Thanks Fellows. I would note that I used this laptop the year before in cold weather (before the installation of a solid state drive) and never had a problem.
It is advisable not to clone onto an SSD. I read somewhere that a basic clone messes up the SSDs system of managing read/write cycle lifetime. You should do a proper install. I recently had to do a re-load of two PCs. It took about an hour to load the OS and astro applications and then 3 hours sitting for it to complete the Windows updates. You can bypass a lot of updates if you make yourself an ISO image of the latest version on a stick first.