Win10 Stuck Restart

windows-10-stuck-on-restartingWin10 Stuck Restart: a reader asks…

My Windows 10 computer notified me that it had to do some updates and restart. I went ahead and hit the restart control, but now I have a blue screen with the circling dots and “Restarting”. It’s been going on for hours now. What should I do?

Sometimes the restart process gets stuck (this has been happening to Windows since as far back as I can remember). The fix is pretty simple, press your physical power button and hold it down for about 8 seconds, then release. That forcibly shuts down the computer. Wait a few seconds and then press and release the button to startup your computer.

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You should see the updates start to progress (using percentages) and when it reaches 100% your computer will start up in Windows so you can log in and continue using your computer.

Normally, forcing a shutdown is not recommended since it has the potential to mess up things if your computer happens to be writing to the hard drive – potentially corrupting files. But if your computer has been stuck for a long time in the restart mode, then you really don’t have much choice, since your computer is unusable. In almost every case where the computer is stuck in restart mode, forcing the restart won’t hurt anything – if you’ve waited a long time (like over an hour), then any disk writing efforts should have completed anyway.

 


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2 Comments

  1. Larry Bouligny

    Very interesting stuff, Chris, keep ’em coming!

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