New
#1
Host of Problems
Hi, I've been having a lot of trouble with my laptop. I'm not sure if these are problems even related to Windows 10, but I was perhaps hoping someone could help steer me to the right places. Some of these problems are
-Audio Driver
This has been crashing on me with some frequency in the past month. It tends to happen more often if I have a Steam game open, listening to a Twitch stream on Chrome, listening to music on iTunes, and connected to voice chat on Discord (yes, audiophiles, go ahead and faint). I'm usually able to restore it via right click -> Troubleshoot sound problems, but it bothers me nonetheless. Is this... normal?
-msdt.exe
This happened only once so far, but I got a "Bad Image" error when trying to restore my audio. Not only was I unable to restore my audio, windows explorer got sunk a few moments later and I was forced to restart through CTRL-ALT-DEL.
-Network issues upon start-up
For the past week, I've had errors with my wired connection, where I basically had no internet connection because of a problem with "gateway protocols." Troubleshooting didn't do anything, I'm only able to work around this by changing the Ethernet ports every time I start my computer
-Start menu/Windows Explorer being extremely sluggish or failing to completely load on start-up
The somewhat slow start doesn't bother me as I disabled Quick Start (the laptop's extreme sensitivity to "waking up" when this option is enabled is irritating as I use this laptop on the go as well as occasional streaming to Twitch, which does put a decent amount of stress on the machine). But from time to time, pressing the Start Menu icon doesn't do anything. Nor search. Sometimes, the clock, speakers, and applications pinned to my task bar fail to appear. Whenever this happens, I can't do anything but open whatever is on my desktop or CTRL-ALT-DEL and restart my system.
Somewhat related, but not immediately after start-up, Search by itself will not open despite having been used an hour or two prior.
-Random apps crashing
This is something I should probably bring up with forums dedicated to these apps, but I wanted to make a brief mention of Gyazo, RaidCall, Puush, and Discord. Gyazo usually crashes if I try to use it's screen capture function, I've almost given up on this after reinstalling it 4 times. RaidCall would sometimes stop responding, either after being left idle for a while or when pressing a web link. It would then refuse to relaunch until I signed out and back into my computer. Puush used to have similar problems with Gyazo, except it would crash if I tried to right click the menu tray icon. This stopped being an issue after reinstalling once or twice, but these days, I often do not get a response from right clicking it right away-- I have to rearrange the Puush icon with another before the right click menu comes up. Discord has a similar problem to RaidCall in that web links will often crash the app, but it would otherwise relaunch normally.
I suspect viruses/malware are not involved. No program is perfect, but I think Avast and Malwarebytes keep my system relatively clean of these. I got this laptop last August, which was preinstalled with Windows 8. I downloaded Windows 10 perhaps 1-3 days after getting it.
I apologize for dumping a lot of vague information. Would logs from the Event Viewer help at all? I don't remember how to access that though.