A customer called us complaining that their Laptop would freeze after booting up. She could move the cursor for about 30 seconds and then the cursor froze and no keyboard buttons worked.
The Laptop screen was frozen.
The only way to reboot the Laptop was to hold in the power button for five seconds which would do a hard reboot.
This is not a good situation to be in as the Laptop’s Window Operating System can get corrupted since it could be in the middle of writing or reading data.
To help me troubleshoot the problem, I plugged in a USB stick that had a Linux distro on it.
Doing this bypasses the SSD and tests all of the Laptop’s hardware. After doing this the Laptop behaved normally which pointed to a problem with the SSD. I was hoping that I didn’t have to replace the SSD.
After turning off the Laptop and removing the battery, I took out the SSD and RAM module.
I cleaned the copper contacts of both devices with an Electronic cleaning spray and reinstalled them into the Laptop.
After booting up, the Laptop stayed on and continued to work normally.
Luckily I didn’t have to do a repair installation of Windows.
So the problem was dirty electrical contacts on the SSD. The reason that I also took out the RAM module, was because it also has contacts that can cause issues, so decided to take the opportunity.