In October 2024, I got a Snapdragon dev kit. Qualcomm Snapdragon So I made it my daily driver, and it remained that way until recently. I also wrote a review of it a year later in October.
Since the first boot, it has been very solid and reliable every day. And as someone who has used Windows since the beginning, I’m always searching through Event Viewer for software or hardware problems (there were no problems). Yes, the fan is noisy, as Jeff Geerling pointed out, but I don’t notice it because I work with headphones.
Of course, that changed last week.
In early December, Windows 11 failed to install a security update (KB5068861) and rolled back during a reboot. I tried installing it twice with the same result. I cleared the package cache, ran normally sfc /scannow And dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth Witchcraft, and even tried manually installing the update from the Microsoft Update Catalog. no go.
So I googled it, found that a lot of people were having the same problem and Microsoft was going to fix it with a future cumulative update. So I put off updates for a month and went on my merry way.
Last week, I turned updates back on. While I was working, I got the usual Windows notification that a restart from a recently applied update was pending. I restarted and immediately realized it was the same update, same failure, same rollback.
Only this time, the rollback did not go as planned. The system rebooted four times before it finally loaded into Windows. And when that happened, it didn’t sign me into my Microsoft account. Entering my PIN got me in, but into a brand new profile with the default, lifeless Windows background.
I had Internet access and most of my apps worked, but I couldn’t open Windows Terminal or most other Microsoft apps… couldn’t even open Event Viewer. I decided to reboot it from scratch (hey, it is Windows after all). But soon after the Windows logo appeared, the system either automatically rebooted or shut down completely… seemingly at random. After a few dozen attempts I had to give up.
Next, I tried to check the UEFI settings by booting into the Boot Device Selection (BDS) menu (by pressing the Home key during boot). Unfortunately, the BDS menus behaved sporadically: random freezing, options that wouldn’t select, and general weirdness. I thought it might be keyboard or USB related, but other keyboards in different ports behave exactly the same.
Persistence eventually paid off, and at one point I managed to get into the BDS menu and navigate all the options. Reinstalling Windows was my best attempt, I disabled Secure Boot, enabled USB-First Boot, and turned on the UEFI option that allows WinPE to use an external display (since it’s not a laptop).
I downloaded the Windows 11 ARM ISO, imaged it to a USB thumb drive, and prepared a second thumb drive with the Snapdragon dev kit drivers I’d previously grabbed from Qualcomm’s website in a large zip file (thankfully, before they disappeared). I was able to boot into the Windows 11 installer, and everything ran smoothly at the beginning. I completed an installation that overwrote my existing C:\ partition, rebooted, and got it through the initial setup just fine.
After selecting my region and keyboard layout, I came to the screen asking for a driver to connect to the network. I successfully browsed the second thumb drive containing the drivers, but before I could click on the file, the system froze and shut down.
Since then, every attempt to boot has failed. It won’t get past the Snapdragon boot logo before rebooting or shutting down… again, seemingly at random. I can still go into the BDS menu, but no options are selectable. This means I can’t reinstall Windows 11, or for that matter try something else like Linux (which still lacks support for the Snapdragon Dev Kit).
I opened the system and reinstalled everything including the SSD. no change. I also tested the SSD in another machine to rule this out, and it’s fine too.
The system was completely healthy and working properly until the Windows update failed.
Did the update somehow overwrite the firmware that shouldn’t have been in it? Or has some UEFI or bootloader component become partially corrupted, which is enough to boot sometimes, but not enough to stay healthy? It could also be a Secure Boot or TPM status mismatch, or a low-level power-management firmware issue given the random reboot-vs-power-off behavior. And since this is a dev kit with no documented firmware recovery path, even a normally recoverable failure may become permanent.
Or maybe a piece of hardware failed at exactly the wrong time. no idea.
If Qualcomm hadn’t discontinued the Snapdragon dev kit, it probably would have been an inconvenience rather than a postmortem. A firmware recovery tool, documented reflashing process, or even a basic support path might have turned this into a defunct afternoon instead of a dead system. On supported consumer Snapdragon PCs, I suspect this would have been annoying, but it can be fixed.
Is this a problem with the Snapdragon platform itself? I doubt it. It was flawless as a daily driver since October 2024. But this also isn’t a normal Snapdragon-based Windows PC… it’s a Snapdragon Dev Kit. The same day it came out, Qualcomm announced that it would be discontinuing it and stopping all future support. Unlike Snapdragon laptops from ASUS, Dell, or Lenovo, there are no OEM-supported recovery tools or firmware safety nets.
And I have definitely not lost faith in this platform. The Snapdragon X Elite is excellent, and until this update, Windows 11 and the system performed flawlessly. It was a great PC for a little over a year, and it’s a real bummer to lose a 32GB machine that was constantly bugging my Core i9 system.
oh ok. RIP, mighty little ARM box.
PS If Qualcomm ever releases a firmware recovery tool for this thing, I will happily update this post.
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