When I stopped by the comic book store last week, my comics connection, Ed, had a problem he needed help with. His two-month-old Acer PC would crash if he walked away from it for a minute or two. It didn’t crash if he was working on it but when left unattended, it would reboot.
My first thought was to check the power settings to make sure his laptop wasn’t going to sleep. Power settings were not the culprit. He’d already scanned his PC for viruses and malware with no issues detected. We did a quick disk cleanup to no avail. I wondered it was a hardware issue but after doing some investigation, we decided to check out another culprit: Microsoft Services. We decided to disable some of them and see what happens.
To disable services, start by typing Services in the start menu and clicking on the result.
When the System Configuration box opens, click on the Services tab.
I suggested clicking the Disable all button and then restarting the PC to see if that made a difference.
He booted the PC back up and it went for a couple of hours without shutting down. BUT, disabling all services left him unable to do important tasks like print or connect to the Internet. I probably should have suggested clicking on Hide All Microsoft Services. Then unticking the boxes next to the other services and seeing which ones caused a problem by their absence.
Fortunately, he was able to take some time to go through the list and enable the necessary services through trial and error. And just like that, the rebooting issue was solved. The likely culprit was probably a software update to one of the services that didn’t play well with Windows 10 or a Windows 10 update that didn’t play well with the software. It’s a process of trial and error but, in this case, it was certainly worth it.