White Screen after Update to 2004

Hi tenforums people!

I would not put a high priority on this ticket.

I am an experienced PC technician, and am just posting this for the general benefit of the community.

I have a run-of-the-mill, consumer-grade Dell laptop Inspiron 15-3565, Win 10 Home x64

AMD Radeon R4 Graphics Card, Driver 26.20.12028.2, 8/16/2019

After running the 2004 update last night, the only issue I had that can be reliably reproduced is that when the system resumes from Sleep (S3) state, I get either a solid white screen or a flickering white screen. In cases where I get a solid white screen, I can force Windows to make a noise to let me know it is running normally in the background. It happens every time I resume from sleep.

I did not notice the issue until AFTER I had applied two KB Updates after the Major Release Update:
KB4552925
KB4537759

In the interests of science, I am going to uninstall the KB's one-by-one to see if it has any effect
Then change to a different version of the AMD graphics driver

It will be several hours before I can make the changes, so if there is anything you want me to try, test; or if you need additional details let me know.

If not, I will report back results later.

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QuickEdit:
On a positive note, this computer had two "pre-existing conditions" on 1909. If I enabled Dark Mode or opened Internet Explorer 11, my system would become unusably slow.

I don't use either of those two, so it was no big deal not to use those features.

After the 2004 update, I don't have either of those issues.

One other piece of information that I should mention:

I was basically testing the resilience of the update, so I did everything to this machine prior to updating that I would normally tell a customer NOT to do:
I installed multiple, competing antimalware softwares
Multiple software firewalls
Just about every commonly-used piece of software you can imagine - over 200 programs
Multiple third-party browser extensions, Excel extensions, Outlook extensions
Software that I knew in advance competed for the same Windows driver, like bindflt.sys

The only things I did NOT test were: Nvidia software and hardware - it is an AMD proc with AMD graphics
DaemonTools
Alladin/aksffridge.sys products
Adobe products (even though one KB was related to Flash somehow)

So, any number of these things could have contributed to the white screen issue, although at this point, I am leaning toward simple graphics card driver

None of this software had any problem with the update, by the way

There was one hiccup with VirtualBox - there were a few entries in Event Viewer and it gave me the UAC prompt twice instead of once on first load, and proceeded to load "something" in the background. All was well after that, and all virtual machines are intact.

Basically, I ran all of that junk for 3 weeks on 1909, so I would have a good baseline. Because those pieces of software on the same machine can cause problems even under normal circumstances (did I mention I had ZoneAlarm on there).

I performed the Feature Update with all of that junk preloaded. Not a single problem other than the white screen. Lol

Progress Report:
I uninstalled the Flash KB first - still white screen
Then I uninstalled the .Net KB - still white screen

So, the additional KB's had no effect on this issue

Here is where the shocker came in:
I usually bend over backwards to NOT use a version of any graphics card driver that is newer than the newest driver recommended by the OEM

But when I went to reinstall the graphics card driver, I discovered that my version of the driver (which I posted in my original post), was newer than the newest version recommended by Dell

So, I installed the latest recommended AMD R4 Graphics Driver from Dell for my model at support.dell.com, and restarted PC.

Working Version was 23.20.800.512

And, no more white screen.

So, there you go.

Just out of interest,do you always manually install graphics drivers or normally allow Windows to do it?
Also for interest,did Reliability History have any entries for the white screen events?

joeandmarg0 said:

Just out of interest,do you always manually install graphics drivers or normally allow Windows to do it?
Also for interest,did Reliability History have any entries for the white screen events?

The more that I think about it, I actually reinstalled Windows 10 1909 from scratch on this machine on 4/7/2020 using the Media Creation Tool (keeping nothing - clean install), and I had no problems with any devices on first boot, so I would daresay that I actually kept the driver that Windows picked for me on that date.

Reliability History shows nothing other than the times I forcibly shut off the machine due to the white screen issue and one other item, which helped me solve a mystery. When I first logged in to Windows after applying the 2004 Feature Update, it mentioned that it needed to finish installing device software, but I wasn't sure what piece of software that it was installing. According to Reliability History, it was the Maxx Audio Installer.

Event Viewer showed no warnings, criticals or errors from the time the Feature Update was installed until I first put it to sleep. But now that I am looking at it, at the moment that the first white screen appeared, it logged an event "The system firmware has changed the processor's memory type range registers (MTRRs) across a sleep state transition (S4). This can result in reduced resume performance." I tend to avoid hibernation like the plague, so I'm not sure why it seems to indicate that it was in hibernation state. But, that specific error has appeared in my logs before the Feature Update.

This part is off-topic, but: There are 3 interesting Bluetooth errors in my Event viewer logs, which may help with the Bluetooth issue that was reported in the known issues page. It seems to be complaining that a second Bluetooth device couldn't connect because it has been assigned the same IP address as another device in my network.

I thought that this machine only had 2 pre-existing conditions before the update, but I now remember two more that are now solved. Basically, the computer would slow to a crawl when opening IE11, when enabling the Windows (Dark) Theme - other themes were unaffected, people were reporting that my audio was choppy over Zoom on all audio devices, and ... now, I can't remember the 4th ....But all of these issues were solved after the update. So, I would say that I am net-ahead.