Lumia 950 XL Random Reboots

[Oen11]

What I have noticed that if I keep my phone active and let it sit for sometime, it reboots. If I press power button to turn off the screen, then it doesn't, reboot. However, I got very frustrated when I was talking to someone with screen on and speaker, phone rebooted. This is unacceptable, the most imp part of the phone is to give person ability to talk and if that doesn't works, its useless..

I have decided to keep replacing it every week till it stops rebooting or they stop replacing then I'll switch to some other phone...

 

[Unauthorized]

What I have noticed that if I keep my phone active and let it sit for sometime, it reboots. If I press power button to turn off the screen, then it doesn't, reboot.

So you are speaking about reboot during calls? It does not crash if you turn it off manually?

 

[Thazal]

I don't even have an sd card installed and my phone will just randomly reboot, not often and at least it's idle when it does.

 

[Thazal]

I haven't had any of the problems that everyone else is having but I also didn't convert from a Windows phone. I was an Android user and set everything up from scratch. The only thing that doesn't work is LTE which is no big deal. I'm happy with 4G for what I do. So far this phone is doing great for me. I'm very happy with it. A definite step up from my LG Optimus G Pro.

LTE problem is an easy fix, I did it over chat. Just use an imei number from a different phone to reg the sim card to. At&t support actually suggested we try that in his trouble shooting steps.

 

[tboling]

I'm not sure if this is related, but I just saw my phone do it. I started looking into my settings and noticed that it had just checked for updated. Maybe the reboot bug is related to checking for updates. Also, I have a 64gb SD card, but have not put anything on it yet.

 

[mariusmuntean]

700$ for a phone that cannot handle phone calls because it reboots, cannot handle SDcards because it reboots, crashes on BT pairing, overheats and despite it's huge battery, it does not last not even as long as the 1520 had. Good job MS on another ship wreck! For those who were lucky enough to have a 950 or a 950XL without any reboots or crashes, congrats, and enjoy it, because it seems most of what I've read here are having serious trouble with theirs.

 

[IANOR]

I think most of the reboots root in the bluetooth issue.

At least for me. When i first activated BT on monday, it rebooted on every phone call via BT, but even when BT was not connected to anything just turned on. During fotos, during calls, during anything. Had 10 crashes in a day. Then i disabled BT again on tuesday, and didnt have a single crash/reboot since then.

 

[mariusmuntean]

I think most of the reboots root in the bluetooth issue.

At least for me. When i first activated BT on monday, it rebooted on every phone call via BT, but even when BT was not connected to anything just turned on. During fotos, during calls, during anything. Had 10 crashes in a day. Then i disabled BT again on tuesday, and didnt have a single crash/reboot since then.

This is what happens when MS is rushing things up. Was that so hard to actually CHECK the drivers of the hw components before releasing these phones??...ohh I have forgot that Satya went frenzy in laying off people...so thank him for the lack of good testing.

 

[wpctrlfan]

I do tons of BT calls every day with my Lumia 950 XL + multitasking at the same time and didn't have a single reboot due to that. On the other hand none of the many SD cards I tried work on my phone without randomly rebooting the phone when accessing them.

 

[jmwhite19]

My Lumia 950 XL, has rebooted a few times, but only when it's been idle and in my pocket. I know it has because my SIM has a passcode and Windows Hello tells me my device restarted.

 

[snakebitten]

My Lumia 950 XL, has rebooted a few times, but only when it's been idle and in my pocket. I know it has because my SIM has a passcode and Windows Hello tells me my device restarted.

Similar report here. I think 3, maybe 4 times since Thanksgiving day. So no real pain here. But I do know that I would be frustrated if I was getting some of the trouble others have reported.

I remember back when the 920 first arrived, I bought 3 or 4 of them for the family. One of them was a nightmare, but having several work so perfectly left a completely different impression than I imagine it would have been if I only bought 1 and it was THAT one. So I completely understand how some folks feel here. But because of that 920 experience, I now know that for some reason you just have to swap em until you get a good one. Inconvenient, I admit. But with this awesome device, like the 920 of its time, well worth it.

 

[hcrick]

My Lumia 950 XL, has rebooted a few times, but only when it's been idle and in my pocket. I know it has because my SIM has a passcode and Windows Hello tells me my device restarted.

Same here, hope they clear this up soon.

 

[jmwhite19]

Same here, hope they clear this up soon.

Hopefully. It sounds like the reboot issues are affecting other units, but I certainly wouldn't class it as a major issue for me. Nothing I do on my unit causes the phone itself to reboot, so it sounds different to other reports.

Heck, even with my Lumia 925 rebooted randomly a couple of times.

 

[anon(4880292)]

Have had the 950 XL for about 5 days now, and only had one reboot, and one time where the phone was getting hot in my pocket for no reason, so pretty stable overall.

Today though I got a SD card, a Kingston SDCA3/64GB U3 card, and reboots just every time i write/read to/from the card, have set everything except the apps to use the SD card, if i take pictures and safe to sd card sometimes it reboots, but it happens every time i try to take a movie, and if i play/delete that movie, reboot, transfer files to SD robot. Just in the past hour about 20-30 reboots.

This is a joke, in 2015 this is an issue, can remember back in the days when Nokia 920 came out, it just rebooted all over the place, and still now years later reboot is still a major issue on Windows Phones. Would much more like if they did not support SD card, and maybe sell with more in built storage, if the phone just reboot overtime the SD card is in use.
Have read that some who put in a slower/older card to the phone, have resolved the re-booting issue, tried some 16GB ultra card from Sandisk, but the phone would not even see the card.

Anyway have been on AC wifi all the time I have had the phone, so this have not been an issue here, the SD card read/write is a BIG issue though, I hope Microsoft will address this ASAP.

Really love windows phone, but needs to work on stability.

 

[Calydus]

I snag this baby Samsung EVO+ 128GB 80MB/s microSDXC Memory Card : microSD, microSDHC & microSDXC Memory - Best Buy Canada at 60$....
it works well, recorded 4k videos with it, stored music, never had a reboot when accessing it. However I was never fond of installing app to the SD card. But all the other things I've tried with it, even browsing it using file explorer, works fine without any problem. Can anyone confirm the same with that card?

 

[drandyperry]

Hi all,

My sympathy to you all. This sd related rebooting of my 950xl has been driving me mad for the past week since I've had the device. (well that and my tempered glass screen protector messing with the proximity sensor!)

Anyway, I'm not sure if I've fixed it or not but I've had 2 days with no reboots. Removing the sd card isn't really an option for me as I sometimes tethered shoot from my dslr and soon blast through the remaining 20 odd Gb on the phone.

I've tried a hard reset and that seemed to fix it for about 8 hours, then the reboots started again when I took a picture and had it save to the sd card.

As suggested either here or on another thread, I've tried a few different formats to the card. NTFS was bad with all allocation unit sizes. The phone would reboot at every picture take.

The exfat file system that the card came with (a pny UHS1 U3 card) still caused reboots but about every 10 pictures.

My current format was exfat with a 4096byte allocation unit size (smallest available). I've had this running for 2 days, about 100 images and I'm still going - no reboots.

It's worth trying it. Let me know how you get on. I'll update if anything changes!

Good luck.

AndyP

----------------------
Update: although I could take as many pictures as I wanted, as soon as I edited a slow mo video the SD card crashed. So no look there. I'm currently running a freebee 2Gb unbranded card which isn't that fast and it seems to be running perfectly. I can take 4k videos, edit slow mo ones and take lots of pictures. Maybe it's related to the cards speed and it doesn't like fast ones!

Gutted: AndyP

 

[wpctrlfan]

Hi all,
My current format was exfat with a 4096byte allocation unit size (smallest available). I've had this running for 2 days, about 100 images and I'm still going - no reboots.

Hi Andy,

thanks so much for your super interesting post! I tried a lot but didnt think of unit size tests.

Removed SD card, formatted via PC, benchmarked and inserted into the phone again. Now downloading Germany map on the SD card and it's looking good! Still running without reboot.

If that is the solution then I dont understand what the root cause could be. I also had tried formatting the card via W10M and the OS should pick the correct unit size I thought.

Tmr I will get my replacement unit and do further tests.

Excited!!

 

[wpctrlfan]

Update: Looked really promising when downloading offline maps to the phone. Didn't reboot!

But then connected the phone to my PC again via USB-C and guess what => instant reboot when accessing the SD card. Didn't even start copying. Afterwards tried the music copy again. After about 20s the phone rebooted.

 

[TexasLabRat]

yeah I tried NTFS formatting as well and doing an exfat with the default allocation format from the PC (128k I think? hugely wasteful but figured if that was the default I'd let it do its thing). I'll try exfat with 4k tonight and see if it behaves any better. I've got 2 cards (different brands) so I might try the other with fat32 and see what happens as well.

 

[wpctrlfan]

Pls also try to write a couple folders of music via PC to your phones SD card. This instantly crashes my whole Phone.