Both Tyler, our paid test solver, and Kelsey, my wife, our unpaid test solver, read PUTTING as PUTTING and not PUTTING. Odds are you did too. Just remember: PUTTING can be pronounced PUTTING or PUTTING.
Thanks for the help. If it's the hardware then it's the hardware. I will try a few more things like booting from the drive in a different PC, but I may have to spend some money.
Checked the logs in Windows, you're right! A corrected hardware error has occurred from PCI Express Root Port. I reseated the drive with no change.
I should mention that this laptop has always had issues with what I assumed to be thermal throttling. It would play games fine for 10-15 minutes before becoming a slideshow. I eventually stopped trying.
I have set that option and I am currently downloading a GPU benchmark. Is that an appropriate test? What should I be looking for in dmesg?
Installed Linux Mint on my old personal laptop (Dell XPS 9560) and unfortunately ran into some issues that made me switch back to Windows. I really want to make it work
It seems to have revealed either a hardware bug or failing hardware in the NVMe drive.
First problem was log spam that filled up the partition:
Some forum posts I found (example) suggested that this was a hardware bug and I could set pcie_aspm=off in grub to work around it. This stopped the log spam and everything seemed to be working fine.
Later while I was doing some programming, everything froze for a while. When it came back, the partition was set to readonly. It wouldn't boot on restart and loaded up busybox instead. I was able to set it to writable, but it happened again soon after.
I decided to switch back to Windows where there doesn't seem to be any issues.
I really want to make it work. If it's failing hardware then I have no choice but to replace the drive, but if it's just a bug then I want to find a fix without buying new hardware. That would kind of defeat the point for me and I don't want to spend the money.
I would appreciate any help. I booted into Mint again to grab the logs and I really want to keep using it.
I hope you can start having fun with these, I like them a lot. Some of the logic is really tricky, but there's always a way to figure out the next innocent/criminal.
I solved the daily #CluesBySam, Feb 4th 2026 (Medium), in 03:53 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩 https://cluesbysam.com/