Were the first two on the same hardware? Because the second one just screams "failing hardware" to me, and could easily be tied in with the first. Startup "chk

Were the first two on the same hardware? Because the second one just screams "failing hardware" to me, and could easily be tied in with the first. Startup "chkdsk" on a Windows machine that simply didn't finish shutting down should be very quick - basically the last thing Windows does is write a "clean shutdown" flag to the drive. On startup, if the disk doesn't have that "clean shutdown" flag set then Windows sees the drive as "dirty" and will prompt to check the disk. Chkdsk for this should take less than 5 minutes and will generally not find anything (since almost all processes had ended & almost all files should have been closed). If chkdsk in this scenario is taking a very long time or is making a lot of corrections, that's a very strong indicator of disk problems. I have no particular guidance on sound issues. There are a bunch of things that could impact battery life, but if you have hard drive issues and it's constantly remapping sectors, etc. then that would definitely have an impact.