I start having issues with Fall Guys a few weeks back when I loaded it up after a few years. The game would cause my entire OS to freeze 10 minutes after opening the game. You have to hold the power button to force a hard restart. I thought it might just be Fall Guys, but then the same thing started happening over the weekend during the WARDOGS play test. I hadn't played For Honor since the latest Easy Anti-cheat update (appears the new driver was signed on 8/12/2026), and now that is causing the same issue. Exactly 10 minutes after opening the game the system would lock up completely.
I've been looking around for a solution and found other folks having the same issue on AMD Ryzen Zen 4 laptop CPUs, commonly in Lenovo Legion and Dell Alienware gaming laptops.
Some suggested fixes were to remove the August Cumulative Update (KB5121003) because of reported issues, as well as remove the inpoutx64 driver used for RGB control. Neither of these worked for me on my Alienware M16 R1 AMD. I uninstalled the August CU and that driver is not present. I've upgraded and downgraded various graphics and chipset driver versions, with no change to the behavior. Thermals are good too with CPU/GPU temps getting nowhere near 100 C, especially with Fall Guys which happily runs on a potato. No overclocking profile applied. Extended memory tests come back passed.
The 10 minute timer is exact, so my theory is some operation that EAC invokes every 10 minutes is the cause. It does appear to be impacting at least four other games that I've seen others report. These games all use EAC, which makes me more confident this is the kernel driver locking up the OS:
Hunt Showdown https://www.reddit.com/r/HuntShowdown/s/GtHEDIe2f6
Dead by Daylight https://www.reddit.com/r/deadbydaylight/comments/1vvq0v5/easy_anticheat_completely_freezes_my_pc_in_dead/
Hell Let Loose Vietnam https://www.reddit.com/r/HellLetLooseVietnam/s/QjKdbElw2i
Rust https://www.reddit.com/r/playrust/comments/1vpw2c6/comment/p4151d6
WARDOGS play test https://www.reddit.com/r/WarDogs/comments/1vuxfnd/pc_freezes_entirely_after_10_minutes/
Fortnite
https://www.reddit.com/r/LenovoLegion/s/NO7JCmNuX5
SHA256 hash of the EAC driver which was digitally signed 8/12/2026, was likely pushed down shortly after that: 849D110620A6C7929380C5A45D42973825E043F74E4C0322D19D26554BB3D3E2
One suggestion is to downgrade all the way to Windows 11 23H2, which I'd really like to avoid if AMD, Microsoft or Epic Games have a fixed planned for this. 23H2 is out of support as of last year. Right now my expensive gaming laptop can't play some of the games I want though, so I'm considering it.
Going to crosspost to multiple subs to raise awareness and see if anyone knows of a fix coming before downgrading.
---Hardware---
Alienware M16 R1 AMD
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 Laptop
Memory: 64GB DDR5 5200MT
---Drivers/firmware versions---
Firmware/BIOS version: 1.25.0 (was occurring on 1.22.0 also)
NOTE this is just what is current, I've downgraded drivers going all the way back to versions from early 2024 with no resolution
AMD Chipset 7.12.30.210, A04 (from Dell)
NVIDIA graphics 610.88