Worrying behaviour on my Win10 PC

ChrisR

ChrisR

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A couple of times recently I've found it difficult to turn our family Win10 PC off. I do the usual thing, Start > Power > Shut down, and it seems to be shutting down, but then the pre-login screen appears (the one with the pretty pic). When I first saw it, after 3 goes I had to turn the power off.

I have BitDefender, and I've run a Vulnerability Scan, a Quick Scan and a System Scan. The first two found no issues; the second ran for 8 hours, and I don't think it completed; this seemed to be something to do with the system sleeping and the scan stalling, needing action when awoken, then the action button somehow got hidden behind the main window. Anyway, in the 8 hours it found 0 problems, but 3 password-protected files (not our user files).

Tonight the computer was on but sleeping (screen auto-off) when I noticed about 9:15 that the screen came back on, and stayed on until I came to try to power off. Same sequence, same problem. Had to force power down.

So, is it likely that something's got into the PC and infected it? And what should I do now?

Thanks for any advice you can give.
 
It sounds like something has messed up power/shut down controls more than anything. When shut down fails, do the ctrl:alt:del thing and start task manager - have a look to see if anything is using resources significantly.

I'd go in through control panel & modify the power settings to prevent the computer sleeping or hibernating, then assign the power button to shut-down. A single press of the power button should make the computer switch off.
 
ancient_mariner said:
It sounds like something has messed up power/shut down controls more than anything. When shut down fails, do the ctrl:alt:del thing and start task manager - have a look to see if anything is using resources significantly.

I'd go in through control panel & modify the power settings to prevent the computer sleeping or hibernating, then assign the power button to shut-down. A single press of the power button should make the computer switch off.
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I'll give the first a try tomorrow, thanks.

Was the second para mainly for doing the System Scan? This PC is very lightly used, so I'm normally very happy that it's sleeping or hibernating or whatever! These days it seems mainly to be when the OH is getting really frustrated with the iPad! (There do seem to be a few things that work better on a computer than the iPad, although it's probably that we just haven't found out how to do them!)
 
I agree with ancient_mariner and it doesn't sound like something malicious but more something that's gone wrong. When you say there's three password protected files you don't recognise what are they and where are they located?

The answer to why it's not shutting is likely in the event viewer but this can be daunting to look through if you're not familiar with it. To access the event viewer, you can right click the start button and choose Event Viewer then expand Windows Logs and click System. Don't worry if you see lots of worrying errors and warnings as they're likely normal, instead you need to look for events at the time the computer failed to shut down with the source Kernel-Power. For example, when I look through my logs at the time I shut down my PC last night I see two events from Kernel-Power, first:

"User-mode process attempted to change the system state by calling SetSuspendState or SetSystemPowerState APIs."

Then
"
The system is entering sleep.

Sleep Reason: Application API"

What you may see in your case is an event showing there were problems trying to go to sleep and may give you an error to work on. You may be wondering why I said I shut down my system but this is showing my system went to sleep, this is due to a change in Windows behaviour that was introduced in Windows 8 where by default the system does not fully shut down or restart when you choose to instead using hybrid modes to speed up start up and shutdown which can cause issues.
 
On the surmise that your protection scans are clear the following occurs to me.

  1. Windows update settings? Though I do not use sleep or hibernate on my PC, Windows update will (depending on settings) trigger a restart or other event.
  2. SFC (System File Checker) that is run in the MS DOS command window (look it up there are on MS and other good websites about the command line instructions and how to use it/them) can be used to find and correct any Windows files corruptions to overcome misbehaving PC
  3. As mentioned above a "restart" will flush the system. NB Shutdown is now a hybrid of 'shutdown' and hibernation.
 
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Thank you I'll give some of those suggestions a try. Definitely Restart first, I think!
 
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I made this cartoon quite some years ago, as you can tell from the representation of a CRT monitor.
The drawing was done in an equivalent vintage of Photoshop, using an A4 Wacom tablet. Sorry it's no help!
 
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Go into Task Scheduler and see if there are any 3rd part apps that are scheduled to run at shut down o at particular times like 9:15. Much of the bloatware apps that are installed on new PC's hide stuff in Task Scheduler.
 
Just a thought is it checking for updates?
Windows active hours are 08.00-21.00 hours by default, if its still on it will check for updates outside these hours unless you change it
 
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