Restart without connecting peripherals

1. Unplug any peripherals such as an external hard drive, an additional SSD, your phone, etc., and retry to restart your PC.
   • If everything works well now, reconnect your peripherals.
2. Press Windows key + X and choose Device Manager.
3. Select a category to see the names of devices, then right-click on the one you’d like to update.
4. Select Update Driver.
5. You can also choose Uninstall in order to reinstall the drivers afterward.
6. Restart your PC.

Force-power off your Windows 10 system

The restart might get stuck due to numerous reasons. However, in most situations, the problem can be fixed automatically, if a new restart is initiated.

But first, the computer needs to be shut down in order to launch the reboot process again. Now, this can be done easily, by following an intuitive solution: just press and keep pressing the Power button for at least 6 seconds – or as long as it takes for the computer to turn off.

End unresponsive processes

1. From the Windows 10 loading screen press Ctrl+Alt+Del to open Task Manager.
2. Choose End task for each process that’s not vital for the start-up operation.
3. Close Task Manager.

The reason why the restart is taking forever to complete might be an unresponsive process running in the background. For example, the Windows system is trying to apply a new update but something stops from working properly during the restart operation.

If the issue is there because an update cannot be applied, you can restart the update operation in this way:

1. Press Windows+R to open Run.
2. Type cmd, and press Ctrl + Shift + Enter to open an administrator Command Prompt.
3. Type net stop wuauserv and press Enter.
4. Input the folllowing commands and press Enter after each of them:
   1. cd %systemroot%
   2. ren SoftwareDistribution SD.old
   3. net start wuauserv
5. The update process will be restarted.

Initiate Windows 10 troubleshooter

1. Press Windows key + R, and enter Control Panel.
2. Click View by on the right corner and select Large icons.
3. Choose Troubleshooting.
4. Go to the left pane and click View All.
5. Click on System Maintenance.
6. Select Apply repairs automatically.
7. Follow other on-screen prompts.
8. Restart your PC.