My nephew has a laptop with Win 10. I just spent a lot of time resolving issues with it. All was well for a couple of weeks. All of a sudden, all the desktop icons disappeared, and no network to use internet, etc. I just did  a repair in place upgrade and that fixed a lot of issues from before. He had this same exact problem recently, but he got online with tech service, and they made a disaster doing the in place upgrade themselves. Got a bad download, and tried to run the upgrade anyway. I fixed all that.
Now he has a repeat of the same issue as before. No icons or I/C connection. I told him to bring it to me without anyone trying to fix it themselves. Last night he called me about a conflicting IP address on his network. I never heard back about that. I told him to restart the computer first.
This guy is totally computer illiterate.

I don't understand how people can have so many problems with Windows 10.  I've never actually witnessed a problem with Windows 10 in person.  It must be a vocal minority thing...

an upgrade from 7? or 8?

i had issues with an upgrade from 7. my start button would randomly stop working type of stuff

did a complete fresh install of 10, and never had an issue again

the upgrade created problems for many people.

I'm a computard of the highest order. but I can click and point all day without issue. I'm going with Win 10 is not the problem.

It is a hardware problem.  Is it an Acer?

Mine would just stop responding.  Once I had a uuuuuuge file go missing.  Main board was bad.  Recently, the last time it did this, it grenaded.  The HD is bad, possibly fucked by another bad main board.

I replaced the laptop and bought the 4 year warranty.  I haven't had one last that long, so I figured it to be a good investment.

I'm with this -- too many odd software problems generally mean a hardware problem.  Conflicting IP address is a weird one but hey, weird things happen when computers start to die.

Also, if this is the third time in a row that he's had the same issue... there's something causing it.   Something unique to him, or at least to a very small subset of people.  Either it's not an inherent problem in Win10, or it's a problem that is only tickled under a very specific set of circumstances.

There are really only a fairly specific set of "software problems" that are caused by hardware problems, and they're *usually* easy to spot if you know what you're doing.   In general, 99% of all software is utter garbage under the hood, and riddled with bugs.   Just because you don't see the bugs every day doesn't mean they aren't there.

I don't even know just precisely how many machines I keep running 24x7, it constantly grows, and I haven't checked in a while.  But I do know that there are five figures in the number.  For every hardware issue I deal with, I deal with 99+ software issues.   It's not even uncommon for me to deal with issues that *seem* like they could be hardware, there's still a significant number of times that it ends up being software.

Latest case?   Software occasionally, repeatedly stopping, and saying that the disk was full, read-only, or otherwise inaccessible.   True culprit?   When the software performed a DNS request *and* got an IPV6 result (had to have IPV6), it would fail to close the handle to the socket, causing a descriptor leak.   Eventually, under the right conditions, it would exhaust the number of descriptors, and would no longer be able to open a new one to write to disk.   Once we showed that to the vendor and they fixed the bug, it never happened again.

Another case, a large amount of our hardware was occasionally reporting memory issues - as in, the BIOS was logging ECC or other issues with DIMMs, and marking that DIMM as failed.   Guess what, changing the DIMMs didn't help.   Worked with the vendor, and whoopsie... it was a bug in the firmware which would sometimes incorrectly flag a DIMM as failed.   With updated firmware, the problem was fixed.

Now I have seen weird hardware issues, like a bad disk controller cause permanent hardware issues with any motherboard it was hooked to, and I've seen one disk controller that would damage any hard drive connected to it.  But these are really, extremely fringe cases.  Software is almost universally buggy.  Hardware probably is, too, but IME, software is much more commonly the culprit of people's problems.

The computer was originally Win 7 and Dell talked him into updating it to Win 10. The in place update I spoke of is do an update/repair process which lets you update, reinstall Windows, and repair issues without re-installing any in place programs.
I don't know what he does with it at home. He runs Office 365 24 hours a day. He also has One Drive? running 24/7. I know he had Dell replace the display, and the HD, and I'm sure the memory has been replaced too. Dell Support reports 16 gb memory, and a 1 TB HD. When I had it here, I kinda thought it might be having a heat issue. His wife likes to "save the animals" and has who knows how many dogs running around the house. I will open it up and check for hair-balls in it. He has had the machine over 4 years.
I am waiting for him to bring it over here so I can look at it.

A fairly safe way to proceed with OEM computers is to nuke the hard drive, and do a fresh install of Windows from an actual Windows disk, not the manufacturer disk, then download the drivers from the manufacturer.

Manufacturers sure love to throw a shmeg-load of crappy, unnecessary software onto their machines.