Windows 10 and my Dell laptop

2-3 months ago I upgraded my Dell laptop (Latitude E6420) from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 10. Apart from a couple of small issues, quickly resolved, it seemed to be ok.

Sometimes on boot it would hang at the 'blank screen' phase, only a forced power cycle would get it boot properly, sometime to power cycle several times. In recent weeks the problem's been getting worse, to the point where I'd start to boot it up well in advance so I'd be sure that it was ready when I actually needed it.

The other evening I decided to go through Device Manager and double check all the drivers to see if they were the latest.

All looked good.

While perusing Device Manager I noticed the Bluetooth adapter and though "I never use Bluetooth, I might as well disable it". I did.

Since then it's rebooted some 20+ times successfully every time.

Whether it's coincidence, whether it's a faulty adapter, or drivers incompatible with Windows 10 (Googling suggests that might be an issue), I've no idea, and frankly don't really care. The important thing is that for the past few days and a fair number of reboots, has been reliable.

I've no intention of trying other things, I don't need Bluetooth, I don't want Bluetooth, I've far better things to spend time on.

Just thought I'd mention this in case it may be helpful to someone else.

Well done for tracking down the culprit.

That's interesting. I've got a Windows 10 tablet that is doing much the same. I wonder if Bluetooth could be hanging the system whilst trying to detect a device. I must try your strategy of turning Bluetooth off, perhaps even disabling the driver as you did.

Looking further it looks, in my case at least, that it seems to be a problem with the Bluetooth device used on my laptop. There's stuff around about it that on Windows 10 it requires new drivers, or at least the Windows 8 drivers.

Quite possibly if I were to follow this up and update as appropriate I could then enable the Bluetooth device and it would all be ok. But frankly as I don't need it, why bother. It continues to boot successfully

I have an Acer Ultra book, which came with Win 8.

At some point it upgraded to 8.1.

When I bought a bose mini speaker, I thought I would try it on the Acer and it refused to work. I had another go some months later and this time resorted to Google for help. Bluetooth got all sorts of mentions of know problems. Latest drivers etc but I failed again.

(I do not actually need them to connect so gave up, with the thought that a cable, which I have will do the trick nicely with less time wasted.)

In reply to a post by philippercival:

I bought a bose mini speaker

Me too and the only time I've had problems with Bluetooth connecting to it is from my Sony VAIO laptop. I've turned the air blue around me several times getting it working but for now (touch wood, cross fingers etc.etc.) it works and I can put my music on and carry the speaker into the kitchen or wherever and listen. It works faultlessly with my iPhone and iPad every time. Just bye the bye - I can't understand how on earth they get the volume and tonal range out of the little blighter.

I went to a live show Saturday night and the group had got a very slim single stack by Bose and I was sitting almost next to it. It wasn't too loud and I couldn't believe when I went to the bar that it was just as loud there as it was where I was sitting. I reckon there's some sort of black magic involved.

Just thought I�d update on the fun I�ve had with Windows 10 on my Dell laptop.

Despite my previous post things went downhill.

The main problem that from time to time it went through a spell of taking several attempts to get it to boot up, it would just hang on blank screen. Needed a forced power cycle to get it try again. Eventually it would get there.

Sometimes it would be fine for a week or so then go downhill. Eventually the Monday after Christmas I got fed up and decided to restore the Win10 image I�d taken. No better. In the end I decided to restore the Win 7 image. It seemed to restore then went into an interminable �checking for disc errors� period. I gave up on that! Went back to the Win 10 image and eventually got it going and it seemed stable and reliable.

Then again 5 or 6 days later it started to go downhill again, and as I was using the laptop for church services � needed its power for the videos � that became awkward.

So very late Sunday evening I decided I�d had enough.

I'd previously downloaded the Windows 10 ISO and had burned it to a DVD. So I started a clean install. It was very straightforward (one mistake I made, I�ll mention later) and within 40-45 minutes of starting I had a fresh, clean, install of Windows 10.

So over the following few days I re-installed all the required apps (even got Autoroute working which, from web browsing, seems to have caused some people problems, albeit I�ve installed AR 2006).

The key thing to me is that (to date) it�s rock solid reliable. Everything is running � some apps needed to be installed either in Compatibility mode (that was also true for some on Win 7) and/or with Administrator rights; nevertheless they�re all running.

I�ve changed nearly all the numerous Privacy settings to No. I�ve installed Classic Shell to give me a Start Menu that I like � don�t like the default Win 10 one, or the tiles. And I�ve got IIS running to give me a web server for checking web site changes before uploading them.

And that�s that. Win 10 is running smoothly, normal boot is fast (the Fast Boot option is set by default). To be honest, with the Classic Shell Start menu is very similar to Windows 7 but faster and uses less resources.

Oh yes, that one mistake I made.

During the clean install it asks for the username you want. I went to type Tony but mistyped it, realised my mistake before I�d pressed Next and went to press Backspace to correct. Unfortunately I caught the Return key! So it took my mistyped name and carried on. I knew that it wasn�t really possible to thoroughly change a username everywhere in the system so I decided to go back and redo the clean install from the boot DVD. Cost me perhaps 30-40 minutes extra, but it was all my fault � arguably the install process should ask for confirmation of such data but it never has so I guess it never will.

Why did I have so many boot problems? Who knows? Maybe it was driver related, maybe some of Dells devices are sufficiently odd, maybe I did something wrong, though I've no idea what if that was the case. In retrospect I don't think it was to do with the Bluetooth that I mentioned earlier, though I've no actual proof either way.

Food for thought there.

I've been considering upgrading my old laptop, which is being used more and more rarely bust still has some important programmes I've been unable to transfer to my new one. A full image beforehand would solve that. (

The problem being a couple of applications with upgrade licence keys that this time won't accept the previous and new key - isnsisting on finding the older version itself ).

I think you can also install an ISO from an external hard disc. If I was doing it on my current laptop that would be necessary as it has no internal real drives at all. Just an SSD.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I think you can also install an ISO from an external hard disc. If I was doing it on my current laptop that would be necessary as it has no internal real drives at all. Just an SSD.

The nicest way to install Windows 10 is from a flash drive.

Which is fine if you have one. As I have a 1TB USB disc with 697GB spare. Surely that would do?

I'm assuming it could start a clean install of Win 10 whilst on Win 8.1 and carry on fine from then on. Is that right?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Which is fine if you have one. As I have a 1TB USB disc with 697GB spare. Surely that would do?

I've never tried using the media creation tool on an external HDD but I suppose it should work like a flash drive.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I'm assuming it could start a clean install of Win 10 whilst on Win 8.1 and carry on fine from then on. Is that right?

You can clean install over anything, since the drive is formatted.

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

You can clean install over anything, since the drive is formatted.

Yes, that wasn't what I meant though .

I was wondering about the external drive continuing to work, given its drivers would be lost and not present in Win 10, if needed during the install. I'm just thinking of the 0.01% possibility after a machine reboot or few.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 11-Jan-16 23:32:26)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I was wondering about the external drive continuing to work, given its drivers would be lost and not present in Win 10, if needed during the install. I'm just thinking of the 0.01% possibility after a machine reboot or few.

All USB hard drives and flash drives use the same USB standard mass storage device driver which is built into Windows, so they will always work.

Edited by Oliver341 (Mon 11-Jan-16 23:39:18)

Thanks Oliver.

I've also discovered that my drive (Seagate GoFlex) has a USB 2 cable, but there is a USB 3 one available to speed things up. Amazon and eBay get confusing about them however, as there are two types wrt the drive end!

The ones that look to be probably right are too expensive to bother with .

When I was down loading widows10,it told me to lose Bluetooth.