Windows 10 update failure

This morning, I received a panic call from a customer that had overnight, attempted to upgrade their laptop to the latest version of Windows 10.

They told me that after they awoke, they discovered that their laptop was only showing a spinning circle at the bottom of the screen.

First thing in this situation is not to panic!

Windows 10 is incredibly self-healing and many times can fix things when given half a chance. By this I mean not to unplug your computer from the wall or yank out the laptop battery.

I instructed the customer to firstly try doing the “three finger salute” of pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del to try to restart the laptop but this was to no avail. Next, I instructed to hold in the laptop’s power button for a few seconds. This will cause the laptop to shut down.

Then after a few seconds I asked the customer to again press the power button. After a few seconds they told me that they saw a message saying “attempting to repair installation”. After a few more seconds they again saw the rotating circle and let out a sigh. I told them not to lose hope and after about one minute the installation was restored. I told them not to turn off the laptop for any reason during this process. Finally after about 30 minutes the customer happily exclaimed that the laptop had been successfully updated!

Unfortunately with laptops, they are set to go to sleep after a certain amount of time. If this happens during a critical time such as doing a major Operating System update such as this case, the update can be corrupted.

If restarting the computer again only produces a spinning circle, try unplugging ALL of your USB devices such as keyboard and mouse. Then, restart the computer by following my aforementioned instructions.