The Mother Board

Hi motherboards team,
I have been having an issue with a refurbished PC, a Lenovo, that my church purchased from Newegg. The pc has been used for their finances. It has an external hard drive as a backup hooked to the USB port. The refurbished PC is running Windows 10 home, has 4 gigs of RAM, and a normal 500 gig hard drive. The PC uses QuickBooks and log me in software. It does not have any other type of software on it, other than antivirus. It is not used for anything else other than finances and accounting purposes. Every time there is a Windows update, the computer will freeze up as long as the external hdd is attached. When starting or trying to start the computer, it does not get any further then the screen that says Lenovo and you can't go any further than that. There is absolutely no way to get into safe mode, or do anything on the PC at that point. I finally figured out, that if I disconnect the USB port which is the external hard drive, do a hard reset by using the power button, and powering the PC back on, then it will start up and Windows 10 will continue to apply the updates that it was downloading. However, as soon as that external hard drive is plugged back in, and there is an update, the PC once again will freeze. The PC that was in the place of this one, was not on anything but a surge protector, and was fried during a lightning storm. However, it was running Windows 7, it was a Dell, and it ran fine with the external hard drive hooked into it. Our pastor decided, to purchase a refurbished $88 PC from Newegg to replace it. Of course now, there is a good surge protector on the PC. But, this PC is not running anything different than what the old PC was running, and it is not being used for anything different than what the old PC was being used for. The same software, which is QuickBooks and log me in plus Norton Antivirus, is running on this PC just as was on the old PC. I am not sure as to why this thing freezes up every time there is a Windows update as long as the external hard drive is connected. Does anybody have any suggestions because I am at a loss at this point to figure out what is going on. The problem is, that we need the external hard drive for Backup, Plus we also need to use this PC for the church's finances. The only thing that I see different is the fact that it is a Lenovo and not a Dell, it only has 4 gigabytes of RAM, plus it has Windows 10 home on it as opposed to Windows 7. Thank you in advance for any help that you can give.

I have seen an article that one of the windows updates was faulty and would cause troubles like this, however, later a fix was released that should solve this issue.

For now, I would check the expernal harddrive for file system errors, windows is quite sensitive if it cannot fully and directly read any connected media at times.

Another question: how old is that external harddrive because they need to be replaced from time to time, just to be sure it will store files correctly and not simply die from one day to the next...

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We hate rut, but we fear change.
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System error, strike any user to continue...

I think I know what the issue is. The hard drive, by the way, is only a year old. Each time windows would send an update, and the computer world try to reboot, it would freeze up. I could do nothing with it. Once I disconnected the hard drive, I could manually restart the PC and it would boot fine. I think when it went to reboot that it was trying to reboot from the external drive, even though the boot sequence was set to the internal hdd. Not sure why that was happening,
Though.

You could try and check the boot order for all connected devices, not just the harddisk. If it says USB bootable media higher in the list, that might indeed be it. However, I still would expect the machine to try, fail, skip to the next bootable option...

_________________
We hate rut, but we fear change.
********************************
System error, strike any user to continue...