If your troubleshooting leads you to suspect non-Windows services are involved in the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error, you need to conduct a process of elimination to identify the culprit (or culprits). That way you’ll know what to leave alone when you put things back the way they used to be. If you’ve already disabled some startup items in Task Manager, for example, you might want to make a screenshot (see how to take screenshots in Windows 10 or 11) to capture the list of disabled items before you disable those still active. When you’ve finished your troubleshooting, you must then go back and reverse all changes. This may allow you to replace or reinstall otherwise problematic or reluctant drivers, applications, updates and so forth. Your PC is now set up for a clean boot, so you’ll want to restart to try further troubleshooting. You can get there by hitting WinKey+R and entering “ msconfig.” Launch the msconfig System Configuration utility.

It seeks to eliminate possible causes of trouble that have been added to the startup environment over time.ġ. A clean boot starts Windows 10 with the barest minimum set of drivers and startup programs. If the preceding suggested repairs provide no relief from IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL errors, a Windows 10 clean boot should be your next step. Don’t be too quick to make such cleanups, and you’ll leave the rollback option open to yourself, should you need it. The excellent GitHub project DriverStore Explorer is great at performing such cleanups, when the time comes. That’s why I don’t remove duplicate Nvidia graphics drivers from my Windows PCs until the new one has run without problems for a couple of weeks.

In all of those cases, by rolling back to the preceding version, I stopped the IRQL error dead in its tracks. In all but one instance, the cause was a buggy Nvidia GeForce graphics driver. I’ve seen the IRQL error on more than half-a-dozen occasions in my 6-plus years of working with Windows 10. (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) Graphics Drivers Often Cause IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL Errors

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