Windows 10: Odd Windows 10 Technical Problems (Long boot times, Steam not launching sometimes, blank...

Hey y'all,

So after talking with MS support on the phone they made it clear I'd have to pay money to actually get this thing fully solved so I'm asking to see what y'all can do for me. Hopefully I can avoid such an outcome

I have a Windows 10 PC that I've rebuilt a few times (CPU, GPU, Mobo etc) and have had very few problems with until 2 days ago. I should note that I torrented 2 games for the first time in about a decade or more maybe 3 weeks ago and ran them both, then played the games a bit and deleted them. I didn't have any issues at all for weeks after they had been deleted.


On 6/4/19 my load times went from about 40 seconds from pressing the Power button to opening Chrome after a log in and rose closer to 5 minutes, which is insanely long on the SSD I have my OS installed on. When it did eventually finish booting and I logged in, all of the usual apps that turn on after the PC has powered up and I've logged in (Steam amongst them) did not start up. Also about half of the apps on my desktop didn't have their proper icons load, so I got a lot of the blank sheets of paper instead. When I clicked on these blank paper icons the error I was given said


"The drive or network connection that the shortcut XXX refers to is unavailable. Make sure that the disk is properly inserted or the network resource is available and then try again."


Sometimes these icons would love however and I could access the app through the shortcut, except for Steam for some reason. But even accessing the other ones would vary based on my luck apparently, as once I rebooted the PC the shortcuts would be lost again.


Everything was also incredibly slow, way slower than normal, with multiple apps freezing or Not Responding for minutes before continuing like nothing was wrong. Steam also wouldn't start or respond at all really, even after I killed the Steam Bootstrapper and Web Client processes through Task Manager. I have a 4790K with 16 Gigs of RAM so it's usually blazing fast even though that CPU is a little older, what I was experiencing was ridiculous.

I downloaded a suite of anti-virus/spyware stuff and got to work scanning all of my drives (Super Anti-Spyware, Malwarebytes, Microsoft Support Emergency Response Tool, CCleaner). Super Anti-Spyware found the usual cookies, MSERT didn't find anything. Malwarebytes found what appeared to be some bitcoin mining programs so I quarantined and deleted them then restarted my computer and ran the scan again. All the scans showed that everything was clear but I was still having long boot times and not getting my icons back. I've had issues before with the Windows Explorer program but usually a restart of my PC or killing that program through the task manager to force it to restart is enough to solve that one.


So I made a bootable Windows 10 USB stick just in case and tried to do everything I could short of a reset or reinstall of Windows. Upon booting up into Safe Mode I was still having very slow speeds and again about half of the apps didn't have icons. Scanning again didn't find anything so I restarted to do a Startup Repair but was told that Startup Repair failed.


Giving up, I just did a reset as most of my documents are on an external drive or my laptop anyway. Welp that didn't work and I'm still having the same problem.


At this point I used Crystal **** Mark to make sure my SSD was running fine and it seemed to pass. While my SSD is only 128 Gigs, it has 25 free Gigs on it so that shouldn't be the problem.

So now I am appealing to you, o people of the Microsoft forums, to help me. I really just wanna figure out what the hell is happening here. I could do a reinstall of Windows 10 but I just want to know at this point what the heck is going on.


Thanks in advance,


David



Basic parts from DXDiag for your perusal:



Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 17763) (17763.rs5_release.180914-1434)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
System Model: Z97X-Gaming 3
BIOS: BIOS Date: 05/30/14 21:22:47 Ver: 04.06.05 (type: BIOS)
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz (8 CPUs), ~4.0GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 16244MB RAM
Page File: 6997MB used, 12190MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX Version: DirectX 12
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
User DPI Setting: 120 DPI (125 percent)
System DPI Setting: 96 DPI (100 percent)
DWM DPI Scaling: Disabled
Miracast: Available, with HDCP
Microsoft Graphics Hybrid: Not Supported
DxDiag Version: 10.00.17763.0001 64bit Unicode

:)

 

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Steam games won't launch on Windows 10?

Hi Oaasfari,

Thank you for being a part of Windows 10.

Before we proceed, I need more information to help you better.

• Which are all the Steam games you are unable to launch?
• Do you get any error message/code when you try to launch the game?

If the Steam games are not working in Windows 10 then, I would suggest you to contact the Games manufacturer for further assistance and check if the Game is compatible with Windows 10.

Reference: Refer to the following Microsoft article on
Windows 10 help & how-to.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/support

Reply with necessary information and we will be happy to help you further.

Thank you.