Screen goes momentarily black then to no icon, no window desktop? What is it this time, Win10...

lunaticfish

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Feb 10, 2015
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Alright so I just got my 9 month old computer back from repair by the company that assembled it, It'd had a bad motherboard. Except now there's a new problem and I don't know if it's the fact that they put in the Win10 10-18 Red-whatever update the morning it came out or something even more sinister, but stuff was busted from the start and I'm on day two of this trash and I need to get back to work but my work is on the computer.

BASICALLY:

When I turn it on, it gives me a "Disk Read Error" and after a few times of restarting it will (very, verrryyy) slowly boot up. Then once logged in it takes several minutes (average 5) before the computer is loaded enough that it even functions- quite a departure from its previous lighting fast speed, and there isn't much on this computer as it is. Then it runs fine until seemingly at random the screen will flicker to black (to clarify it's not the monitor doing it, it doesn't turn off and on it runs normally when this happens), and then I will be back at my desktop, except there are no icons, my righthand tray on the task bar is missing icons, and windows of running programs will not display. If I hover over say an open youtube icon on the taskbar it shows the preview no problem, I can literally watch the video in the preview icon. Sound continues to work. Clicking the windows start icon works but the windows button on the keyboard only highlights it, not open it. Even if I shortcut to task manager it wont show up, nor will anything I "open". These things clearly are running, they will get icons on the taskbar with previews and all, but the windows will not display. On a couple occasions the screen then went to black and I couldn't do anything.
I ran all the troubleshooters and nothing showed, I ran check disk twice and nothing came up. I updated every driver possible and nothing.

I also have 100% disk usage for some reason? Something seems to be funky here.

I'm of course talking to the repair team but it's the weekend, and my warranty is expiring this month, so my hopes are not high on their end. I've already missed a month of work for this computer which I haven't even paid off yet, if anyone can help I'd be most grateful!
 

When thry replaced the motherboard, did they use the same make/model as your original motherboard?
 

lunaticfish

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Feb 10, 2015
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Yes they did clarkjd!

Okay everyone I'm a bit glad to report that I believe I've at least solved the desktop display bug- my monitor was registering as two.

So at the start of the motherboard failure I had gotten that new monitor just in case it had been the issue at hand, and when plugging everything in upon getting the computer back yesterday, halfway through I decided not to use the HDMI but go with the VGA-HDMI connector- except, like a fool, in the effort to get the VGA connection in I never actually pulled the HDMI cord out.

You can probably guess the rest but I was at least smart enough to notice I seemed to have two monitors detected, and considering part of the issues I've been describing I figured that was likely significant and while trying to figure that out, in a moment of luck I pulled out the HDMI cable and saw only one monitor was detected. Then I plugged it back in, and instantly recreated the desktop bug I've been describing. So the computer has been under the impression I had a dual-monitor set up, and since I had never defined any particulars it kept moving my desktop and windows to the phantom HDMI monitor for reasons I couldn't know.

I am now wondering if this is the culprit of the 100% disk usage, as I checked all the processes diligently and nothing ever did anything irregular, not even AVG or Superfetch. Could it have been the sheer confusion of the computer? My usage is in fact 0-1% now.

And I'm hoping that it may also explain the disk read error when I've been booting- if it had two connectors on start up it must have been waiting for that phantom monitor to appear and only sometimes one of the two would register correctly and I was able to correctly load up.

So, solution, I am truly an idiot but this might help someone in the future so here it is! --> Do not use both VGA and HDMI connectors at once unless you have two monitors set up!