Laptop freezes after booting up
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 shut down the computer. Upon booting up the computer it would again freeze.
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 the SSD internal storage drive.
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.
Update to my post because of a recent Microsoft Update:
Microsoft’s original Secure Boot certificates (from 2011) expired in June 2026. Windows Update is pushing new certificates to every machine via a scheduled task called Secure-Boot-Update, which runs a few minutes after every boot and tries to write the new keys into your BIOS/UEFI firmware.
On older PCs with outdated or no-longer-supported BIOS, this write operation crashes the firmware → entire system hard-freezes. That’s why it happens a few minutes after startup, every time. Reinstalling Windows does NOT fix it. If it happens too quickly for you to do the below steps in time, before the computer freezes, then turn OFF the WiFi signal that the computer is connected to.
*Step 1 — Disable the scheduled task:*
- Press `Win + R`, type `taskschd.msc`, press Enter
- Navigate to: **Task Scheduler Library → Microsoft → Windows → PI**
- Right-click **Secure-Boot-Update** → **Disable**
*Step 2 — Stop future updates from re-enabling it (registry):*
- Press `Win + R`, type `regedit`, press Enter
- Navigate to: `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecureBoot`
- Double-click `AvailableUpdates` → set value to `0`
- Right-click empty space → **New → DWORD (32-bit) Value** → name it `HighConfidenceOptOut` → set value to `1`
