Patch Tuesday Crashes PC On Restart

[Charlie]

On three occasions now Microsoft's Patch Tuesday Updates have crashed my Win 7/64 Bit p.c. All goes well with the downloading and the installation of the updates, but when it comes to the obligatory restart the computer just goes to a black screen or gets into a restart loop when attempting to reboot.

The only saving grace has been to start and restart the computer on numerous occasions until a repair option is presented. Any thoughts/solutions would be appreciated...

[Simon H]

Not a lot of information to go on but about 3 or 4 weeks ago there was a security update (2823324) that caused widespread problems like you have encountered.

Check if your pc downloaded this and if so this link to a KB article gives steps to rectify it.

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2839011

[Charlie]

Hi again, Simon H, and thanks for your response. Checked all the kb reference numbers and none match the one noted in your answer. This problem occurred with today's updates (15/05/2013 - Australia) and only occurred with my desktop and not my laptop, which runs win 7 Home Premium.

As noted earlier this has happened on other occasions as well, so I'm going to be pretty wary when it comes to the next lot of updates from Microsoft. Other than what I noted initially there is not much more to mention. But I did notice at one point when the installation process had begun (approx 25% in) that the pc froze for about 15 seconds or there-about.

I'm not too sure how to track back to which update may have caused the freeze. So any insight here maybe of some help in tracking down the culprit. Also, on checking the reliability history page a message indicated that that there was a problem with ram. As my computer is fairly new I think I can rule that one out. The freeze has only occurred with the restart after Microsoft updates and not on normal everyday start and restarts.

[Simon H]

I’m not aware of any other recent problems with windows updates. Sometimes, installing updates can stress a machine and take a long time to process even on a relatively new machine. I have seen second gen core I7 machines take 10 or 15 minutes to install and initialise windows updates. Having said that its not very often or recently but this could be whats happening to your machine.

Regarding the possible ram problem found by reliability monitor, download Speccy by Piriform. It’s free and gives you accurate information about your system ram, temperatures and everything you want to know. If there is a problem with your ram or any other hardware then this will tell you. Here’s a link to a step by step on it.

http://www.groovypost.com/howto/get-detailed-information-about-pc/

You can also view the windows update history to check what updates where installed on the days you had the problem. Then you can Google those updates to see if anyone else has had similar problems to yourself with those same updates.

Check that all the updates have installed correctly, it may be that one of them keeps failing and that’s what is causing the problem.

If there's nothing else in the reliability monitor that stands out and you want to poke around a bit more you could check for any errors in event viewer. Type “event” into the start menu search box and choose event viewer.

If you can find an error that coincides with the dates that you had the problem then you can use the event ID to check the Microsoft website for possible fixes.

The problem is, the windows logs keep a lot of information but most of the time you need to be a bit lucky or have an inspired guess to tie that info up with a specific problem unless you are an expert.

If it keeps happening and you keep looking at the logs eventually something might stand out.