I upgraded my Samsung Ultrabook from Windows 8 to 10 last night. Now, it’s virtually useless. The Start button does nothing. Windows Explorer does nothing, and clicking on it gives me an error message, “Explorer.EXE System call failed.” Right-clicking on the desktop does nothing. I cannot open any folders. I can access a few icons on the toolbar, such as volume and messages and the clock/calendar, but that’s about it.
Any ideas?
Those are all features of Windows 10, designed to protect you from yourself with “the safest Windows Operating System Ever!”.
Some errors may be addressed in SP2…
Hope and pray? ./sarcasim
In all seriousness though, get a windows 8.1 disk and re-install. Some
people here have experience recovering files if needed.
Fortunately, file recovery is not an issue. I don’t have anything on the laptop that I need, including software. I just need to be able to access the Internet and store files when I take trips.
Try a clean install of Windows 10. Upgrades are hit and miss.
Upgrades are free; how do I get a full install?
Download the tool from Microsoft to make a USB or ISO installer.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/media-creation-tool-install
When asked, select the version of Windows you have (either Home or Professional). When installing just click skip when it asks for a key. When booting for the first time it will activate automatically if Windows 10 has already been installed on the machine in the past. For the free upgrades Microsoft tracks the hardware with a unique identifier rather than giving out product keys. Note this only works if Windows 10 has actually been installed on the machine at some point in the past.
Thanks, Luke.
I actually just completed a re-install from my USB stick. This time, I told the Installer to reset my PC, and wipe out everything. So far, it seems to have worked. I’m posting this from my Windows 10 laptop, using the new Edge browser.
Just so I can understand… it is still using the free upgrade, but you opt for a clean install and not upgrade the existing OS to keep all the software and files you have currently?
This is still the free upgrade version of Windows 10, right?
I used a full fledged copy of Win10 when I upgraded my son’s Win7 computer which was an upgrade Win7 from XP/Vista. What an ordeal… Had to BUY Win10 and not get just the upgrade since we were changing out the Motherboard and CPU. 
Yes. In fact, I used the same media installation file that I already had on my USB stick from my first attempt. All I did was select Restore, then the options to obliterate everything, instead of upgrade.
On my first attempt, my laptop worked OK that night, but began bogging down the next day, until it became unresponsive to most requests. I haven’t tested my laptop on its second day with the Restore option.
I up/down graded my Dell from 8 to 10 and seem to be working fine.
Everything was working fine, until this morning. When I clicked on a conversation on the Talk forum, Edge kept reloading and decrementing up the page. I finally installed Chrome, which seems to be working correctly.
EDIT: This morning, Chrome began doing the same thing. Now, both Edge and Chrome keep loading aomw forum threads after I open them, decrementing the post viewed number so the thread moves down my page, until it reaches the top of the thread. It hasn’t done that for this thread, yet, but it’s done it on all the new threads.