Windows 10 is restarting suddenly and randomly

dell-inspironrebootwindows 10windows update

Since a few months ago (not sure if it was after the last Microsoft update), my Windows 10 laptop is restarting on its own without any warning, it was doing it once or twice a month only, but this last month, it's restarting every day.

I tried to manually update the drivers, but the problem is still here.

I searched all over the internet and it seems like many people are facing this problem, but I couldn't find a solution.

Laptop model and specs: Dell Inspiron 15R (N5110), i5-2450M, 8GB RAM DDR3, Nvidia 525M

Best Answer

An automatic Restart when the system crashes is unforunately the default. You can disable it by unchecking the box Automatically restart in the Advanced tab of System Properties, under Startup and Recovery.

Also make sure that Write debugging information is enabled with a setting of Automatic memory dump or something like that, and that Write an event to system log is checked.

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Next you review the Windows system Event Logs via the Event Viewer app. Look for Error and Critical entries for clues.

Next thing to do is install a Memory Dump analyzer like WhoCrashed. It can tell you which device driver crashed the computer if that is the case. For example, in my case it showed the Video Driver as the culprit, and even gave a plain English recommendation: A third party driver was identified as the probable root cause of this system error. It is suggested you look for an update for the following driver: nvlddmkm.sys (NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 375.95 , NVIDIA Corporation):

On Sun 11/20/2016 9:32:54 AM your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\112016-6000-02.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: nvlddmkm.sys (nvlddmkm+0x3E15B0) 
Bugcheck code: 0x1000007E (0xFFFFFFFFC0000005, 0xFFFFF8088BBA15B0, 0xFFFF9980C97297F8, 0xFFFF9980C9729020)
Error: SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED_M
file path: C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nv_dispi.inf_amd64_410e5247be0e5f00\nvlddmkm.sys
product: NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 375.95 
company: NVIDIA Corporation
description: NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 375.95 
Bug check description: This indicates that a system thread generated an exception which the error handler did not catch.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem. 
A third party driver was identified as the probable root cause of this system error. It is suggested you look for an update for the following driver: nvlddmkm.sys (NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 375.95 , NVIDIA Corporation). 
Google query: NVIDIA Corporation SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED_M

Which suggests that I will downgrade the driver that was recently installed.

In my case, Windows 10 kept on updating the driver to the faulty one on its own, until I disabled that "feature" in Device installation settings:

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Another thing to do is to uninstall recent Windows Updates which could be faulty. For example, if you installed Security Update for Microsoft Windows KB3200970 then try to remove it.

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