Razer Blade 15 2020 Base multiple issues | Razer Insider
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I have a Razer Blade 15 2020 Base model (Windows 11 Home 23H2 build 22631.3880) that has had a number of issues over this past summer.  The first was a factory battery that nearly exploded and needed replacement.  The next few issues are more complex and lengthy in explanation.

The first problem that I encountered occurred after I had installed and uninstalled Wallpaper Engine on Steam.  While Wallpaper Engine itself had not given me any problems while installed, after I uninstalled it to source potential performance slowdown, I would encounter a fairly consistent problem with multiple popups stating either overruns of stack-based buffers in various applications, or missing Visual Basic runtime widgets.  Additionally, it will randomly open Microsoft Edge and/or Intel Graphics Command Center.  Running offline virus scans came up negative, attempting to do clean reinstalls of the Visual Basic C++ Redistributables from Microsoft’s website, a clean reinstall of Steam, and fully updating Windows 11 have all not resolved this problem that occurs only when opening and closing most installed Steam games.

I ultimately performed a system restore on my laptop using a system restore stick and was able to successfully revert the Blade 15 to factory settings, which reverted the OS to Windows 10.  It was a tedious and lengthy process, but I was able to fully update Windows 10 and reinstall and update all of the drivers and programs I needed, including Steam minus Wallpaper Engine.  The popup errors had also ceased completely.

HOWEVER, this morning I downloaded a BIOS update for my Blade 15 from Razer’s support page (update took me from v1.03 to v1.06).  After the BIOS update completed, I noticed that the Windows login screen was slightly different, and logging in revealed that not only had Windows been updated to Windows 11, but the BIOS update had completely reverted back to the way the system was prior to the system recovery, with all programs installed from before, AND the bug was back.

Has anyone every encountered this kind of issue before, as it makes no sense to me why a BIOS update would completely undo a system restoration.  I do not want to go through the tedium of performing another system restore if it’s just going to undo all of that again, so I need to know if that is a possibility.

[update]

I restarted my computer, only for it to start in Windows 10 in the post-system restore condition.  I should have disclosed that I have a pair of Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 SSDs installed in my Blade 15 as a C and D drive.  For some reason though, after the system restore was performed, it had decided to create the factory reset on the C drive and moved the previous version onto the D drive.  After the BIOS update, for whatever reason, it booted into the D drive instead of the C drive, but booted into the C drive after restarting the system.

I’m still bewildered as to why this happened after the system restore in the first place, given that the original data should have been overwritten to reset the system to factory configurations.  There was nothing in Razer’s online documentation on the system restoration process to indicate that it would or could do something like this.  My current concern is the potential for system instability to occur if I choose to reformat that D drive to get rid of the data on that drive, given that was the older, problematic version of Windows I was trying to get away from.

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