Laptop won’t shut down or restart… anyone else had this?

Tech Support Forum
1

I’ve got a Lenovo Legion 7 that just won’t shut down or restart anymore. All the windows freeze up, but I can still click on stuff even though nothing actually works.

I tried doing a reset once, looked up some solutions online, but none of them fixed it. Then I tried using MSCONFIG to check if a driver was causing the problem, but that just locked me out with a ‘can’t find your pin’ error. Had to reset again, but since it can’t restart properly, I end up hard powering off every time it needs to reboot during the reset.

After the reset, Windows was super glitchy, taking forever to load, and kept crashing. Decided to do a fresh install from a USB. Tried installing, but every time it needs to restart during installation, I have to force it off. This has been an endless cycle.

Interestingly, the laptop does seem to shut down normally when it’s in safe mode, which is why I tried MSCONFIG to find the bad driver. But now it’s acting up even during a clean install, so I’m totally stuck.

Anyone got any ideas? This is driving me nuts. Thanks in advance!

2

It sounds like a CMOS reset might help:

  1. Power down your laptop
  2. Unplug everything, including the power cord
  3. Hold the power button down for 60 seconds
  4. Let go of the power button
  5. If it’s still acting weird, press the power button again for 30 seconds
  6. If you can, go into BIOS settings and select ‘Restore factory defaults’ or ‘Optimize for OS’
3

@Blessings
I already replaced the CMOS battery when the time started drifting, which was the first sign of trouble. That didn’t fix it, so I also tried replacing the RAM. I’ll give it a shot like you said, but when I tried resetting BIOS to default before, it wouldn’t save and exit :confounded:

Do I need to disconnect the main battery from the motherboard to do this?

4

@Carmine
Yeah, I’d recommend unplugging the battery first, then go through the steps from 3 onwards.

5

Do you have a Windows install CD or USB that you can try?