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Hello! So a couple of days ago I wanted to reinstall a game I bought on the well-known Steam platform. The game’s size is about 88 GB and I had at the time around 250 GB free on my HDD. So far so good. I proceeded to install the game but as I was waiting for it to be done, I see that my network usage is constantly at 0 MB/s and from time to time jumps at 60 MB/s for about 3 seconds then goes back to 0 and my disk usage was constantly at 2-3 KB/s. It was unusual as my laptop is connected through ethernet so my downloading speeds should be decent.
So I decided to stop the downloading of the game and check a few things. I started by defragmenting and checking my disks, which both were 0% fragmented and healthy. I checked my internet by using google and other apps that required a pretty good downloading speed, and everything worked just fine. But when I get back to Steam and start downloading the game again, the problem persisted.
Next thing I’ve done was to check if other games from Steam would suffer the same download speed… and unfortunately the answer is yes, they do. So that means there’s something wrong with Steam. I tried to change the download region, limit the bandwidth, and reinstall Steam but nothing seemed to help.
Now this is where I might have messed things up even more…
Nothing that I could find on the internet helped so I decided to factory reset my laptop. I backed up my important files and waited for my reset to complete.
Everything looked fine, no errors, didn’t power off the system while the reset was done, so I guess everything should be fine.
But as open up File Explorer to check if everything got deleted, I observe that my HDD was missing from the explorer. That was quite scary because it never happened before so I didn’t know what to do. I entered my laptop’s BIOS to check if the system sees it, and of course, it was there, it wasn’t missing. So that confirmed it was not broken.
However, in the file explorer, the HDD kept disappearing and appearing each time I restarted my laptop.
I disassembled my laptop, cleaned the dust, checked the HDD physically - no signs of damage whatsoever, cables were connected properly, so it looked fine.
At this point I was confused. But I thought to myself it’s a temporary thing and I proceeded to reinstall steam and try to download my game again.
Google crashed once… managed to search for steam and download the setup. Then when i opened the file, my browser crashes again. I opened the File Explorer, clicked on the setup and it crashed again… finally after I restarted my laptop, I managed to install Steam, and I installed the game on my SSD to avoid any other problem.
Everything was fine, except for the crashes that occurred from time to time, but I got used to it.
Today everything got worse and I’m completely done with it. My laptop took over 15 minutes to boot, and when I finally booted and tried to open up my game’s executable file, nothing happened. I figured maybe Steam has to be opened first. I clicked on Steam, again nothing happened.
10 minutes later, steam pops up saying that it’s verifying my installation and never opened again. My game started up, I got into the main menu, then it crashed.
I opened the Task Manager, ended all the app tasks, and tried to reopen them… no good.
So my question is: Why can I open only specific apps such as google, discord, GIMP, and use them perfectly, but as soon as I touch Steam or the game, my laptop enters a continuous loop of crashes. Sometimes if I restart my laptop it won’t even boot at all, getting blocked in a black screen.
If anyone could help I would be extremely thankful, it’s starting to bother me a lot, and I literally have no idea what’s going on!
So I decided to stop the downloading of the game and check a few things. I started by defragmenting and checking my disks, which both were 0% fragmented and healthy. I checked my internet by using google and other apps that required a pretty good downloading speed, and everything worked just fine. But when I get back to Steam and start downloading the game again, the problem persisted.
Next thing I’ve done was to check if other games from Steam would suffer the same download speed… and unfortunately the answer is yes, they do. So that means there’s something wrong with Steam. I tried to change the download region, limit the bandwidth, and reinstall Steam but nothing seemed to help.
Now this is where I might have messed things up even more…
Nothing that I could find on the internet helped so I decided to factory reset my laptop. I backed up my important files and waited for my reset to complete.
Everything looked fine, no errors, didn’t power off the system while the reset was done, so I guess everything should be fine.
But as open up File Explorer to check if everything got deleted, I observe that my HDD was missing from the explorer. That was quite scary because it never happened before so I didn’t know what to do. I entered my laptop’s BIOS to check if the system sees it, and of course, it was there, it wasn’t missing. So that confirmed it was not broken.
However, in the file explorer, the HDD kept disappearing and appearing each time I restarted my laptop.
I disassembled my laptop, cleaned the dust, checked the HDD physically - no signs of damage whatsoever, cables were connected properly, so it looked fine.
At this point I was confused. But I thought to myself it’s a temporary thing and I proceeded to reinstall steam and try to download my game again.
Google crashed once… managed to search for steam and download the setup. Then when i opened the file, my browser crashes again. I opened the File Explorer, clicked on the setup and it crashed again… finally after I restarted my laptop, I managed to install Steam, and I installed the game on my SSD to avoid any other problem.
Everything was fine, except for the crashes that occurred from time to time, but I got used to it.
Today everything got worse and I’m completely done with it. My laptop took over 15 minutes to boot, and when I finally booted and tried to open up my game’s executable file, nothing happened. I figured maybe Steam has to be opened first. I clicked on Steam, again nothing happened.
10 minutes later, steam pops up saying that it’s verifying my installation and never opened again. My game started up, I got into the main menu, then it crashed.
I opened the Task Manager, ended all the app tasks, and tried to reopen them… no good.
So my question is: Why can I open only specific apps such as google, discord, GIMP, and use them perfectly, but as soon as I touch Steam or the game, my laptop enters a continuous loop of crashes. Sometimes if I restart my laptop it won’t even boot at all, getting blocked in a black screen.
If anyone could help I would be extremely thankful, it’s starting to bother me a lot, and I literally have no idea what’s going on!
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