My laptop freezes when I click on the sound or battery icon

[curtastic]

This has been happening for about 4 months now. Several windows updates have come along that didn't fix it. When I click the sound icon or battery icon in the windows taskbar, my laptop instantly freezes completely except I can still move the mouse pointer. Also the keyboard capslock still lights up when I press it. I have to hard reboot. The same thing happens when I right click on the desktop and choose Display Settings. Also I used to be able to flip the display upside down by pressing control+alt+down but that stopped working around the same time. When I open nvidia geforce experience it opens then says "Something went wrong. Try restarting geforce experience"

My laptop is Windows 10 with the latest update. Razer Blade 2014. Nothing plugged into it. Audio and games work fine.

In safe mode I am able to open the Display Settings but there is no option to reduce brightness. My eyes hurt. In safe mode when I click the sound icon it says Detecting problems then "Troubleshooting couldn't identify the problem"

I have also tried restarting explorer and chkdsk /f

I have also tried updating graphics drivers but it says they are up to date.

[Qube]

I have also tried updating graphics drivers but it says they are up to date.

Have you tried the latest GPU driver from your laptop manufacturer? - I say this as sometimes the driver from your laptop manufacturer is different to the official GPU company and Microsofts version.

If you have tried that then try the latest version from the GPU's Manufacturer directly.

I'd also try booting into safe-mode and seeing if the issue remains as if it doesn't then at least you'll know you're dealing with a driver issue or background software.

[curtastic]

I'm not sure if I'm looking correctly but it looks like all the GPU drivers available from the manufacturer are at least 3 years old. I have also tried downloading drivers from geforce.com but it says I already have the latest.

My computer also freezes if I go to Windows Settings and click System.

[TomToad]

Completely uninstall the video driver, then reinstall.  Sometimes old files interfere with updates or get corrupt causing problems.http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_13955.html

If there is still a problem, you might need to use a utility like Display Driver Uninstaller to hunt down and remove remnants that the official uninstaller has problems with. https://www.wagnardsoft.com/

[curtastic]

Ok I uninstalled my geforce, and my laptop still freezes at the same times. It's using the Intel graphics card now because that's all that shows up in device manager under display adapters.

[curtastic]

Now after restarting several times it says my geforce is back (in device manager). I didn't reinstall or reenable it. I don't know which graphics card is being used, but I don't think it matters.

[curtastic]

Now all audio sounds distorted and fuzzy. When played from anywhere, iTunes, youtube etc. This has never happened before. Any way to undo this? When I uninstall my graphics card it comes back after about 3 restarts and when I do update driver it says it's already up to date.

[MagosDomina]

It sounds to me you could be having hardware failure. How old is this laptop?

Can you try a fresh installation of Windows 10? Was this computer upgraded from a previous version of Windows?