joddle

I had seen that page and tried those recently - but now today the icon is not moving anymore - but I have no idea why ! I will keep an eye on it and see what happens. So strange!!!!

Hi Ken - I tried that but don't want the icons to auto organise so turned that feature off again. Also I have tried changing the icon size but the "My PC" shortcut icon still keeps moving to a free space on the left after every shutdown. None of the other icons move apart from one other which is the shortcut for the control panel! Its really weird and does not seem to happen on any other pc . If I reposition the icon then press refresh it then jumps back to the left hand side again - exactly as if I had rebooted.

When I reboot - just one icon keeps changing place on the desktop - its the shortcut to "My PC" I keep repositioning it but every time I reboot it reverts to a different place. I have tried: A - changing the options on view for the desktop B - Refreshing the changed positions on the desktop C - and even deleted the icon .DB file from my local app settings in the hope it would then remember the new positions D - deleted the shortcut and made a new one But whatever I do this one icon always changes place on reboot and seems to want to go towards a free space in the top left hand corner. Other icons can be moved just fine and stay where they are put! Any ideas please!!

Thanks Ken - I had thought of doing that but then decided to read more about the bios setup and eventually found there is a toggle between UFEI with or without legacy ROMs - turning that off seems to have sorted the problem and the machine does now boot a lot faster and with only once splash screen - I have not noticed any disadvantages but of course can always reverse the setting if need be.

The bios is set to UFEI and the M2 drive is the only once it has in the boot sequence. If I press F12 and select a one time boot on the M2 drive, the Dell splash logo only comes up once. If booting from cold then it still comes up twice with a small pause between!

I have a Dell 7040 but when it is booting, the splash screen with the Dell logo comes up twice before W10 loads which I thought was a bit odd. The latest bios was installed when I first got the PC. The pc now has a 1tb M2 drive on the motherboard where the OS resides plus two mechanical sata HDDs and one sata SSD The sata SSD is where the OS was before I installed the M2 drive but it has since been reformatted and is now used simply as another drive. The PC is pretty quick to boot up to W10 (17 seconds) but not as fast as when I first had it (around 10 seconds) as now it seems to be trying to do something twice each time! I have not changed anything in the BIOS yet as I don't want to make things worse but any ideas what may be happening here please??

If you don't expect to increase your likely storage you can simply keep everything on the SSD then back it all up to the HDD. However I had a machine with almost the same spec as yours and found the SSD soon became full so I put in a M2 drive of 1tb and transferred to OS to that - now I have the old SSD as a files drive and the HDD as a backup for everything although my HDD is 2Tb not 500Gb. - Using the M2 and SSD for all the main work makes the machine pretty fast!

Maybe I'm tempting fate but since my last post there has been no repeat of the BSoD!!! The last thing I did was install the Dell SSD driver and this seems to have worked. Also I have now installed a new 1TB M2 drive and all is working fine. For 2 weeks the machine was on 24-7 with no problems at all. Fingers crossed :)

Further to above: - Last night I ran the complete Dell diagnostics including memory checking and it ran though with no errors or problems found.

Hi - I did in fact update the bios as I thought that might have been part of the issue but it made no difference. One thing that I noticed on the Dell website is a driver for SSD sata drives which I have now downloaded and installed - I am wondering if that might have been something to do with the issue - so I am waiting to see! Currently a little reluctant to reset the bios to factory setting in case I can't then boot up as the OS is on the SSD in the 2.5 rack and not on the 3.5 drive! maybe I am worried about nothing ?

Well it has happened again although as yet I have not removed the wifi or graphcs card but did remove my old webcam and am now connected to the on board graphics. However, using a debug reader I find the culprit on every occasion is the same - and is flagged as ntoskrnl.exe - The output is below What is this and what do I need to do? I am thinking of stripping the machine again and taking out the wifi and video cards to start with - and reinstalling from scratch the latest W10 then installing the Dell drivers again and working from there. However if there is a better way I would be please to hear about it. I note from the web that overclocking can cause this but how do I know if my machine is overclocked? I had also though of using a 500gb M2 ssd and installing the OS there as there is a slot currently unused and the current system ssd is only 128gb although I do have a 2tb 3,5 drive as well for backing up data etc which was transplanted from my old system. The 3.5 drive has no system files only data.. 021220-6140-01.dmp 12/02/2020 14:28:00 DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE 0x0000009f 00000000`00000003 ffff9b04`f6d7b7f0 ffffdb8a`7927f7b0 ffff9b05`01b8f9a0 ntoskrnl.exe ntoskrnl.exe+1c14e0 NT Kernel & System Microsoft® Windows® Operating System Microsoft Corporation 10.0.18362.657 (WinBuild.160101.0800) x64 ntoskrnl.exe+1c14e0 C:\Windows\Minidump\021220-6140-01.dmp 8 15 18362 1,194,540 12/02/2020 14:29:13

I have started to use the onboard graphics card and can see no real difference between that and the add on one. I am working in 1600x900 which for me on my 24" monitor seems about right as the print on many things on the high res setting is too small for me. But what differences should I observe using the Nvida card? I am not into gaming so speed is not an issue. To me for the moment, the less hanging on the machine narrows down the possible culprits! I have also disconnected my very aged Logitec orbit webcam in case that was having issues as there are no modern drivers for it from Logitec. I will at some point remove the wifi card as I really don't need that anyway.

Again a BSOD so I think I am going to do a complete reinstall of the PC. This is what I intend to do but please correct me if I need to change everything. 1) remove graphics card 2) remove wifi card 3) remove 2nd hdd leaving only the SSD in the 2.5 bay 4) download latest W10 iso 5) download all drivers for this PC's service tag 6) reformat ssd 7) load W10 8) load Dell drivers 9) then use the PC for a week without further SW to see if issues re-occur Have I left anything out?

Have done that now so will wait and see if that helps :) The previous owner recommended uninstalling the Nvida drivers and letting Windows deal with the display card but I don't know how to uninstall those. ~ I may consider removing the graphics card and the wifi card as really I don't need either of them

I can see the minidump files but it says I dont have access to them although I am the only administrator on the machine I will try uninstalling the mouse and reinstalling or update it and see if that helps.