I’ve been playing a lot of Path of Exile 2 ever since the game was released and lately, I’ve noticed that my computer has been locking up during intense gameplay sessions. For no apparent reason, whenever I transition to a new area, the screen freezes. This is indicated by the gears at the bottom of the screen no longer spinning. When it happened once, I thought, “Okay, this is PC gaming; stuff like this happens sometimes.” But after it kept happening repeatedly, I put on my IT Professional hat and started investigating the issue.
Using an overlay to monitor my PC usage while running Path of Exile 2, I noticed that transitioning to a new level caused the CPU usage to spike to 100%, effectively locking up the system, all without the fans sounding as loud as a PlayStation 4 Pro, which if it did, would have pointed me into the right direction at the start. Scratching my head in confusion, I started digging deeper and remembered that I had recently forced the installation of the Windows 11 24H2 update. Then I came across a lot of chatter online about this very update and the problems it’s been causing....
