Windows 10: Laptop Rebooting, But Only At Night

Specs

Dell G7 7790 laptop Core i7 9750H 16GB RAM RTX 2060 Win10 Home (latest major release and security updates)

What's happening is seemingly daily now, around 5pm the system will start rebooting on its own for no apparent reason. It never seems to happen between the time I get up (around 5:30-6:30am) until around 5pm at night.

• I'm reasonably sure it's not heat related because the system always reboots when it's sitting idle and barely doing anything, plus I'm able to play games like No Man's Sky at 4K resolutions without issue for hours at a time.
• I have scoured the Event Viewer and cannot find anything right before the reboot, just an error after saying that the system didn't shut down cleanly.
• I have checked for any scheduled tasks that may be causing the system to reboot, couldn't find anything obvious.
• My power settings are so that the system should never go to sleep when it's on AC power (which is always) and the AC adapter is even plugged into a pure sine wave UPS so it should be getting nice clean power.
• I do notice several kernel-power related errors in the event viewer, but that isn't overly helpful because it doesn't tell me the specific component having issues.
• I tried updating all the drivers I could find, which includes getting rid of the shitty Realtek audio drivers Dell ships.
  • Updated the nVidia drivers a week or two back, had the issue before and since; the Intel ones won't install unless they're from Dell or you go out of your way.
• In the past I have gotten error messages about a power surge on the USB ports, but haven't seen that in probably over a month.
• There are two external HDDs connected to USB at all times. One is a portable drive (bus powered) that is connected via a USB-C hub. Another is a desktop drive that has its own power supply. Currently it's connected via a USB extension cable, but I had this issue even when it was connected directly.
• The BIOS version is the latest one put out by Dell.
• I tried disabling the power saving mode on the ethernet port, no change. Currently testing if Wifi will make a difference.
• Using Norton Security... Whatever you get from Comcast Xfinity service. It sucks, I know, but for a while Avast wasn't playing nicely with Thunderbird.
• Ran Dell's online hardware tests the basic and full. Only errors it found were with the webcam, but since I leave the lid closed on the laptop, that's to be expected.
• Was using the beta version of Windscribe's desktop VPN client for the split tunneling, but even after reverting back to the stable version, no change. I'm connected to the VPN basically 24/7.

That's what I can think of in terms of what I've done to troubleshoot so far. I was going to run memtest86+ but seems I'd have to turn off secure boot in the BIOS first and so maybe if I can't come up with anything else I'll move back to that.

Any ideas welcome. I'm hoping there's some kind of software fix because with all the covid-19 stuff going on, unless I want to repair this thing myself (I don't, and don't have a good place to do it anyway) I'm probably stuck with it until places open back up and I could drop the computer off.

submitted by /u/the_harassed
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:)

 

Best laptop under $800??

Well the last one I suggested seems to be the best for 650$

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Windows Night Light always on for laptop monitor.

@Zedrick Del

I did the steps you described, but the problem remained the same after doing so:

After reboot, the night light setting was disabled and there was no blue-light filtering, as it should be. However, as soon as I (dis)connect any external monitor, some blue-light filtering is applied to my laptop screen (although according to the settings,
night light is still off).

 

Night Mode

Hi David,

Additional information will give us a clarity to your concern. We would like to know if you are referring to Night Light. If yes, follow these steps to turn off the Night Light:

• Open Settings.
• Click on System.
• Make sure that you are on Display tab, and then toggle the
  Night Light option to Off.
• Click on Night light settings.
• Click on Turn off now button.

We look forward for your response.