Blue screen after windows update. Please help.

October 12, 2018 12:09 PM

Hi. My wife's laptop is running windows 10. She recently applied a windows update. Her system now goes to the blue screen immediately when she boots her computer. Here are some pictures of what she sees. She's in college and needs her computer for programming assignments and midterms next week. What's the best way to fix this quickly?
posted by Proginoskes to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

This will depend on the cause of the error, but when I ran into the same issue a few months ago, I managed to get the laptop up and running by selecting "Disable driver signature enforcement" from the advanced options menu. I still occasionally got BSODs after that and had to get tech support to fix the underlying issue, but this worked for me as a temporary fix.
posted by littlegreen at 12:34 PM on October 12, 2018

guessing it's an hp business laptop... here are some unofficial instructions to fix this month's BSOD after update.

you basically just rename/delete C:\Windows\System32\drivers\HpqKbFiltr.sys
posted by noloveforned at 12:38 PM on October 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's not an HP; from the pictures it's an ASUS ROG laptop.

My wife has a ROG laptop too and a recent Windows update broke the audio. I then broke it further trying to fix it and got into a similar fails-to-boot thing.

If you can get back to the Automatic Repair "Choose an Option" screen (I found that forcing a power-off by holding down the power button during a failed/endless-spinny-wheel-of-lights boot will boot to Automatic Repair next time) the "Troubleshoot" page has an option to "Reset this PC" which basically does a Windows reinstall. It deletes all the applications but has an option to keep the user's data.

That seemed to work OK for us. The audio still didn't work after the reset, but the fix for that was: go to the Asus support page for the laptop's model, install the audio driver from there.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 3:16 PM on October 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's likely the result would be useless, but did you try scanning the qr code to see what it says?
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 4:53 AM on October 13, 2018

The HP debacle cause a WDF_VIOLATION error on that bluescreen-- you're getting a SYSTEM THREAD EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED (ask me how I know... grr.)

Littlegreens suggestion is good-- you get to that mode by going to 'Troubleshoot' > 'Advanced Options' > 'Startup Settings'-- Pick Restart, then choosing that option. 'Safe mode with Networking' might also be worth a shot.

Trying a 'System Restore' might work if Windows did a decent job of that before the update applied-- so just go in there and you can pick a date before the BSOD started-- but in my general experience System Restore fails 80% of the time (doesn't hurt anything, just fails to be able to run).
posted by Static Vagabond at 6:41 AM on October 13, 2018 [1 favorite]