My neighbor asked for my help with his laptop, which suddenly stopped working after he paused a movie. Here's what's happening: 1. I power on the laptop and see the Asus logo with some circles loading underneath. 2. The logo disappears, but the screen remains black. 3. I can move the cursor, but nothing else works. I can access the BIOS without any issues, and it doesn't show anything on an external monitor. I can't access Task Manager or do the Windows key reset for the GPU driver. After a while on the black screen, a small colored square appears on the screen. The laptop immediately shuts off when I unplug the charger. I even tried turning off fast reboot in BIOS, but that didn't help. I suspect it might be a Windows or OS issue. Any advice?
4 Answers
I hear you! Sometimes, just letting it sit unplugged and powered down for a bit can help. I’d keep trying different methods to see what works best. Good luck!
A good idea is to pull the battery out for about 10 minutes, then try booting it again without the charger. If it works after that, put the battery back and see if it stays up. If not, check if the drive is BitLocker encrypted; that could be causing issues too.
This could also point to a possible Windows corruption. Since it seems like it's loading but not displaying the UI, you might want to boot into Safe Mode first. If you can access that, clean up the startup list and then reboot. If nothing works, you may need to connect the hard drive to another computer to diagnose it using CrystalDiskInfo.
It sounds like your neighbor’s laptop could be stuck loading Windows. Try using CTRL + Shift + ESC to see if you can open Task Manager. If that works, create a new task for explorer.exe and see if the UI loads from there.
I already tried that but wasn't able to access Task Manager. I'll give it another shot though and see what happens.