Alright folks I'm hoping you can help me with this one. This is a rather difficult problem to explain so I will just dive right into it.
Over the past week this problem has occurred suddenly 4 or 5 times. I will have a few programs open, specifically VLC Media Player and Google Chrome, and then seemingly at random everything will shut down except my web browser. I can still surf the Internet when this happens, but every other program has disappeared and there is no Error Message to speak of. The desktop is gone from behind Chrome, no Metro overlay, all I see is my solid green color scheme. I can log in and out Windows and press ctrl-alt-del to access Task Manager but all the processes have shut down and I can't do anything but use Chrome. Once I shut that down it's just solid green and I can't do anything until I restart. Restarting always fixes the problem but I can't for the life of me figure out what is going on. Microsoft Chat Support said there was an issue with Windows Explorer but all my Googling efforts reveal fixes for people who get Windows Explorer Crash Messages. This laptop doesn't have an optical drive and Windows 8.1 came pre-installed so I am unable to just have a fresh install of Windows. There is a recovery partition on the hard drive but I'd rather fix this problem another way if possible since I'm not entirely sure how that works on this HP Laptop. It definitely seems like a software issue rather than a hardware issue. This is a new machine, I have scanned for viruses and it has come back negative.
So long story short, does anybody know what's going on with my system? It's as if Windows is still functioning but Task Manager indicates that all processes have shut down except for the Web Browser, the taskbar at the bottom just disappears and I'm left with a navigable Chrome window and that's it. All Word documents shutdown without an option to save (which is the biggest issue for me due to school). Each time this has happened I was watching a video on VLC in the background. It seems like there are some conflicting processes happening but it's not actually causing my system to hang or crash, just making every program crash except for my browser, though I'm not sure if this is for any particular reason other than that is what I was looking at at the time (as in maybe if I had my Word document up everything else might crash except Word - though I can't be sure). Somebody please help!
Over the past week this problem has occurred suddenly 4 or 5 times. I will have a few programs open, specifically VLC Media Player and Google Chrome, and then seemingly at random everything will shut down except my web browser. I can still surf the Internet when this happens, but every other program has disappeared and there is no Error Message to speak of. The desktop is gone from behind Chrome, no Metro overlay, all I see is my solid green color scheme. I can log in and out Windows and press ctrl-alt-del to access Task Manager but all the processes have shut down and I can't do anything but use Chrome. Once I shut that down it's just solid green and I can't do anything until I restart. Restarting always fixes the problem but I can't for the life of me figure out what is going on. Microsoft Chat Support said there was an issue with Windows Explorer but all my Googling efforts reveal fixes for people who get Windows Explorer Crash Messages. This laptop doesn't have an optical drive and Windows 8.1 came pre-installed so I am unable to just have a fresh install of Windows. There is a recovery partition on the hard drive but I'd rather fix this problem another way if possible since I'm not entirely sure how that works on this HP Laptop. It definitely seems like a software issue rather than a hardware issue. This is a new machine, I have scanned for viruses and it has come back negative.
So long story short, does anybody know what's going on with my system? It's as if Windows is still functioning but Task Manager indicates that all processes have shut down except for the Web Browser, the taskbar at the bottom just disappears and I'm left with a navigable Chrome window and that's it. All Word documents shutdown without an option to save (which is the biggest issue for me due to school). Each time this has happened I was watching a video on VLC in the background. It seems like there are some conflicting processes happening but it's not actually causing my system to hang or crash, just making every program crash except for my browser, though I'm not sure if this is for any particular reason other than that is what I was looking at at the time (as in maybe if I had my Word document up everything else might crash except Word - though I can't be sure). Somebody please help!
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 8.1