Both Characters Stuck on Infinite Loading Screen

[MilkieTea]

Okay, I believe I may have pinpointed the issue - AT&T users have been reporting possible outage issues for the last several days - this may be the case for you. This was happening to me before, not to the same level, but stuff not loading constantly, things being slow and clunky, and it turned out my ISP was having outages all week that I'd been having the issues.

I gave it a few days and a lot of the ping and latency issues stopped.

However, you may also have to do some internal work yourself:

1. have you tried defragmenting your hard drive? if not, you should do that.
2. (kind of basic but doing this helped with my overall pc speed immensely) clean out your fans with a can of compressed air if they're looking a tiny bit dusty.

Alternatively

3. It may *actually* have something to do with space, normally when PCs start running out of space things get a bit wonky. See if you can't get an external SSD or HDD (2 terabytes HDD will set you back around $50-60 USD, a 1 tb SSD will set you back about $150 give or take ten or twenty bucks, pros of an SSD: you'd get more speed out of your storage, HDDs are a bit outdated in how they deliver information. Things will load faster, take less time, your PC will probably go from taking 30 secs-1 minute to boot up to taking like 5 secs)
4. Worse comes to worse, save all of your necessary files onto an external drive, like a flashdrive or external HDD/SSD and do a full reinstall of windows to your laptop. Normally you don't have to do anything outside of going into "Updates & Security" > "Recovery" > "Reset this PC" and choose a full reset, where it deletes all your files (which is why I recommend saving everything you need onto an external drive OR on something like google drive). Then when it's done, don't redownload anything other than your preferred internet browser and ffxiv, see if that fixes it. If it does, then slowly start downloading your other programs - after each program, run ffxiv and try to log in and if you get the infinite loading, then you've narrowed down the issue.

[mara-v]

I tried opening the NVIDIA settings and setting the card to preferred in that window, and also deleting the intel display adapter and restarting. I'm not sure it made much of a difference but here's what the system settings looks like now: [posted at bottom of this reply because I'm not sure how to do the spoiler/click to show tags in this forum]

Regarding AT&T, I actually didn't have any problems with slowness or lag before the loading issue, and can still create a character and load into the world on it! It's somehow only affecting these 2 characters. You might be spot on with the storage issue, because of my laptop's storage I have FFXIV installed on an sd card that's inserted into the side (could that be affecting something?). Thanks for the recommendation to defragment the hard drive, it cleaned up a little space but unfortunately didn't affect the issue.

=-=-=-=-=-=- System Information -=-=-=-=-=-=-

SYSTEM_OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit (6.2, Build 9200) (19041.vb_release.191206-1406)
SYSTEM_CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6300HQ CPU @ 2.30GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.3GHz
SYSTEM_CORE_NUM SYSTEM_CORE_LOGIC 4 SYSTEM_CORE_PHYSICS 4
SYSTEM_BIOS 1.2.7
SYSTEM_LANGUAGE English (Regional Setting: English)
SYSTEM_MEMORY 8060.391MB
SYSTEM_VIRTUAL_MEMORY 134217727.875MB
SYSTEM_PAGE_FILE 9340.391MB
SYSTEM_STORAGE C:\ SYSTEM_HARDDISK_DRIVE SYSTEM_TOTALDISC_SPACE 225.832GB SYSTEM_FREEDISC_SPACE 21.277GB
SYSTEM_DIRECTX_VERSION DirectX 12
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS Intel(R) HD Graphics 530
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DEVICE \\.\DISPLAY6
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_CHIP Intel(R) HD Graphics Family
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_MAKER Intel Corporation
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_VRAM 4055.750 MB
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_SHARED_VRAM 4030.195 MB
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DAC Internal
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DISPLAY_MODE 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (60Hz)
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DRIVER C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\ki127176.inf_amd64_86c658cabfb17c9c\igdumdim64.dll,C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\ki127176.inf_amd64_86c658cabfb17c9c\igd10iumd64.dll,C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\ki127176.inf_amd64_86c658cabfb17c9c\igd10iumd64.dll,C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\ki127176.inf_amd64_86c658cabfb17c9c\igd12umd64.dll
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DRIVER_VERSION 23.20.0016.4973
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DRIVER_DATE 2/27/2018 17:00:00
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DRIVER_LANGUAGE English
3.0
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_PIXEL_SHADER 3.0
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_VERTEX_TEXTURE SYSTEM_SUPPORT
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DEVICE Unknown
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_CHIP GeForce GTX 960M
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_MAKER NVIDIA
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_VRAM Unknown
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_SHARED_VRAM SYSTEM_UNKNOWN
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DAC Integrated RAMDAC
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DISPLAY_MODE Unknown
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DRIVER C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvdm.inf_amd64_2c7c773e20d8bcfa\nvldumdx.dll,C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvdm.inf_amd64_2c7c773e20d8bcfa\nvldumdx.dll,C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvdm.inf_amd64_2c7c773e20d8bcfa\nvldumdx.dll,C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvdm.inf_amd64_2c7c773e20d8bcfa\nvldumdx.dll
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DRIVER_VERSION 23.21.0013.9125
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DRIVER_DATE 3/15/2018 17:00:00
SYSTEM_GRAPHICS_DRIVER_LANGUAGE English

[Jeeqbit]

I've read that some laptops use the onboard graphics to save battery life but temporarily get assistance from the GPU for games.

While the game is running, if you open Task Manager, go to Performance and click "GPU 0" (and any other GPUs listed), you could check which has a significant amount of usage: Dedicated GPU memory or Shared GPU memory.

Dedicated GPU memory being what is used should help confirm it's actually using the GPU.

[mara-v]

I'm back in!!

I did a deep dive into my storage and discovered that Steam was taking up a huge chunk of space, but I wasn't using it because my few steam games are too big to actually download. Deleted steam and uninstalled FFXIV from the sd card, and reinstalled it on the laptop proper. Loaded up the first character and she's back in to the now-loaded Eastern Shroud. You guys helped me cover so much ground that I'm fairly sure the issue was with either the amount or type of storage.

Thanks so much for all the suggestions & help! I'm giddy that I'll get to see my friends' in-game houses this weekend.

[MilkieTea]

I'm back in!!

I did a deep dive into my storage and discovered that Steam was taking up a huge chunk of space, but I wasn't using it because my few steam games are too big to actually download. Deleted steam and uninstalled FFXIV from the sd card, and reinstalled it on the laptop proper. Loaded up the first character and she's back in to the now-loaded Eastern Shroud. You guys helped me cover so much ground that I'm fairly sure the issue was with either the amount or type of storage.

Thanks so much for all the suggestions & help! I'm giddy that I'll get to see my friends' in-game houses this weekend.

I'm glad we were able to help! Yeah the issue sounded like either an ISP or space issue, and I'm glad it was something you were able to fix yourself. Congrats on getting the game to run!

[Jeeqbit]

Ah, I didn't realise it was on an SD card but that most likely explains it. The game trying to read from that efficiently was most likely a problem. Read speed from a storage drive has a big impact on load times and some drives can actually allow you to load instantly.