PC boots up successfully, but freezes upon login and restarts automatically
PC boots up successfully, but freezes upon login and restarts automatically
Hey there! I just assembled my first PC and it performed surprisingly well at first. After connecting it, powering it on, and booting into Windows on my existing M.2 SSD, everything seemed fine. But after the initial restart, I began to notice issues. Logging in took about 5 seconds, then the whole system would freeze for roughly 15 to 20 seconds before displaying a black screen with the error “Critical Process died - 0xEF.” It would automatically restart into the problem manager. Interestingly, if I stayed in the login screen without logging in, the PC wouldn’t restart at all. When I entered Safe Mode, the PC would freeze immediately, and the error message would reappear before it rebooted. I’m an IT professional, so I understand some of what I’m doing, but I’m not sure what’s going wrong. So far, I’ve tried: reseating RAM, GPU, CPU; reinstalling Windows; and swapping RAM sticks by themselves. The specs are: MAG 760 Tomahawk WIFI Motherboard, 2x16GB DDR5 5600MHz RAM, GeForce RTX 5060 Ti GPU, Intel I5-14400F CPU, 650W power supply. Please help me out—I’m getting really frustrated! Thanks!
Are your BIOS and drivers current? Is there a method to bypass the login screen? The “problem management” interface should include an option to proceed to Windows. What occurs if you select that? Are there any additional components you could replace? I suspect the SSD might have driver issues that didn’t resolve after reinstalling Windows.
Because Windows has limited RAM support, your PC isn't... Consider using a Linux live USB instead. The most reliable way to confirm is swapping in new RAM, ensuring it's recognized, then resetting the CMOS and avoiding XMP/EXPO settings. This applies to Windows 11 as well.