Hello, I apologize I am not tech savy. I was hoping I could get help here. I have a Crucial MX 500 ( I think ) for several months and for the past 2 weeks my activity light stays solid and locks up my screen. This happens 4-5 times a week maybe more.
I only have a few things installed such as Steam and a few games nothing else really. My question is, can I clean out the SSD without removing the Operating system ? I was thinking about restoring the pc back to factory settings but I only done that with a HDD and I replaced the HDD in this pc with the SSD. Thank you.
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I was hoping I could just get rid of everything without losing the OS and start fresh again. I've done that with HDD's before but never a SSD. Unsure what to do.
Speaking of which, do you have anti-virus software installed and properly updated?
I'd also recommend downloading some anti-virus software, having it scan your system, and seeing if it finds anything.
https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/support-storage-executive
That's more specifically tailored to your particular SSD than anything else that you're going to find is.
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Not sure whether Windows Defender is the same for all versions of Windows but if you have Win10 there is an option to "Run an Advanced Scan". This allows you to run both a full scan and an Offline Scan. These are the easy first steps. It may not be a virus of course but worth checking. And if its a nasty virus you may have to start your PC in safe mode but easy steps first.
Also do you have something for cleaning out tracking cookies e.g. CCleaner. You can download from e.g. FileHippo. Its unlikely that the problem will be down to thousands of cookies but getting rid of them won't do any harm!
https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/
See if that finds any issues. From your description it does not sound like a HD issue to me. Possible but i would check other things first.
Then go to control panel/programs and features see if something is installed you did not want to install, and if you know it is something you can safely uninstall do so.
Check all the programs. Look on google for any you do not recognize, make sure you do not get rid of anything you are not sure of.
After that reboot and see if any issue remain. If so then it may be time to go the replace from a backup/restore.
Even on my friends laptop where his recovery partition was borked, just throw the basic drivers (storage drivers, maybe network drivers most important) from your laptop manufacturer's website on the usb also just in case, then redownload the rest after windows is reinstalled.
Something that happens in 1 out of 5 start ups sound more like some software trying to run its updater and failing.
Like Quizzical said, you should try to use the task manager to see if you can find out what program has problems: When you've got the problem press ctrl + alt + del to go into task manager, from there you'll find list of all running processes, and hopefully you can find one process that's using huge amount of CPU or memory.