Windows 10 bug that forced a reboot – giving you just a minute to save your work – is now fixed
Microsoft cures LSASS issues and lifts upgrade block
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Windows 10has received a fix for a troublesome bug that reboots the system, with the user having no say in the matter, and being forced to quickly save all their work within a minute.
Affected users find themselves being faced with a dialog box that informs them: “Your PC will automatically restart in one minute. Windows ran into a problem and needs to restart. You should close this message now and save your work.”
As you can imagine, this could be pretty inconvenient if you’re in the middle of something, not to mention a rather frantic rush to save everything if you were working on multiple apps at the time.
However, this issue only hit a limited set ofWindows 10users, with the bug being introduced by recent updates for the OS, andMicrosoftconfirming in November 2020 that there were issues with the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) on some PCs.
The problem occurs for those who have renamed local accounts (like ‘administrator’ or ‘guest’) when they’re “interacting with any dialog window that lists users, for example accessing the sign-in options settings app page or the users folder in the Local user and groups MMC snap-in”.
This led to Microsoft putting an upgrade block in place to stop systems that could be affected from updating to the latestOctober 2020 Update.
Interestingly, this issue has cropped up in the past, as evidenced by a post onRedditwere the solution to the problem was seemingly wrapped up in motherboard settings.
Get the best Black Friday deals direct to your inbox, plus news, reviews, and more.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
Fix deployed
At any rate, a fix for the current issue has now been deployed and the block (or safeguard hold as Microsoft calls it) has been lifted.Windows Latesthighlighted the resolution of this problem in a Microsoft support document, whichread: “As of January 7, 2020, this issue is now resolved and the safeguard hold has been removed when devices are using the latest feature update bundles and refreshed media.”
“Please note, if there are no other safeguards that affect your device, it can take up to 48 hours before you will be able to the update to Windows 10, version 2004 or Windows 10, version 20H2.”
In other recent Windows 10 bug news, a fresh gremlin witnessedantivirus software interfering with newly created files and the Chrome browser(which meant that, for example, bookmarks weren’t being saved).
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
Alt + Tab trouble: Windows 11’s 24H2 update turns time-saving shortcut into ten-second headache
Windows 11’s Paint and Notepad apps are getting smart new AI features – though one of the best will be for Copilot+ PCs only
Trying to get the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU? It seems only scalpers have it and they’re jacking up the price
