SSD Woes

About a year ago I upgraded the SSD on my laptop to one with more capacity. The original was very small and within a couple of months was bursting by the seams. The new SSD, from Crucial, offered 512GB at a reasonable price, and it certainly improved the overall usefulness of the laptop. A few months ago, I started having some issues that I initially assumed were caused by some OS problem.

My Outlook client kept freezing, with messages saying some files were corrupted. I performed a scan on the disk and had the software used correct some issues, which seemed to have solved the problem. Later, my Internet Explorer started exhibiting a very curious behavior. Any time I close a tab, I would get a pop up message that announced IE had stopped working, and I would click on 'Close program' in order to continue. Any other tabs or windows would continue to work, but this became really annoying.

So I started using Chrome for most of my browsing, but some work applications required IE, so the problem kept bugging me. I searched online and applied several suggestions that should cure this problem, but with no luck. Finally, i let down my arms and formatted the hard drive, re-installed Windows and all the applications I need, but from the very beginning I got the same behavior from IE. Even before any extra applications were installed, IE was giving me those pop up messages!

Adding to this, I started getting BYODs every few minutes, to a point where I just couldn't use the computer, not to mention the temperature of the CPU was going through the roof, even with no programs running. After a weekend of BYODs I called Lenovo support, which were amazingly efficient, as always, and the next day I had an engineer at my door to replace the fan. He did, but the BSODs continued, so  paid a bit more attention to the error messages and realized that after a BSOD and its corresponding restart a message would display on the screen stating that the hard drive could not be found. A reboot would solve this issue, but that got me thinking the problem could actually be in the SSD.

I managed to get to the Crucial support webpage and downloaded a firmware update for my specific SSD, applied it and guess what? Not only the BSODs stopped, and the temperature went back to normal levels, but my IE was finally cured! A SSD that was dying was now fully restored to full health, and my system is running like new.

My point? Check your supplier for firmware updates, driver updates and so forth, for all your hardware, not just your peripherals. This may solve a lot of issues you may be having with your system.