A little while ago, I got a message from a friend of mine telling me he damn near called tech support regarding his new (read, $1000 kind of new ) computer – after a round of Windows updates it wasn’t booting. Right about as he was going to dial them it finally got going, and things seemed fine.
I’ve had this happen often – for a few months any machine rebooting would often hang on the “circle of dots” black screen in Windows 10 for about 2 minutes before finally getting to the login screen. This problem eventually solved itself, and things were fine. Windows 10 is an ever-evolving operating system, and to that end, I figured Microsoft was just screwing things up -I couldn’t find anyone else having this issue so I figured it was just a nuance of my desktop computer.
Well, in the case of the issue my friend had, it was a little more than that. It would seem this was actually a rather unique bug involving a setting in Windows 10 OEM installs from HP – a registry flag was conflicting with something in the September update and was causing this relatively massive delay in the system rebooting.
Now, I use HP machines as the norm, and I noticed I have had no issues with this. The probable reason is that my machines were all upgraded from Windows 7 and Windows 8 to Windows 10, and so are not HP installs but standard Windows upgrades. I would imagine I’m more “in the clear” from these issues on those grounds.
Anyway, various solutions have been found, and this apparently was a big enough issue for both HP and Microsoft to expand upon it and provide some form of workaround. Basically, what looks to have been going wrong is a service called “App Readiness” bogging down the system – disabling this fixes the issue. Who knows, perhaps this was the issue I was having on my machine months ago, just in a slightly different form. In whatever case, MS blames HP, HP blames MS, and while fixes are out there no one wants to admit to who’s fault it is.
In whatever case, at least there are fixes. To that end, I’ll leave you with several links regarding this problem.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/6zqvm4/windows_boots_to_black_screen_after_signing_in/