So I've had a Wii U for just over a week now. It's been great and the family has been enjoying it. It was a bundled package, 32GB black Wii U with Nintendoland and Super Mario 3D World. However, it's not uncommon that upon system startup, the console freezes and doesn't respond to any input other than a four-second power button press, to power it down. The screen output is black, and the gamepad reports it cannot connect to the Wii U console. The power indicator is solid blue.
After I power it down, it boots up again just fine, with no further issues other than a message dialogue stating that the console had been forced to power down the previous time it tried to start.
I can't seem to find any pattern to the crashes, as it seems to happen regardless of what trigger I use to start it, be it a Wii remote, gamepad, or the main power button. I've tried using the Wii A/V cables instead of HDMI, also disabled the quick start menu on the gamepad. I've read that can sometimes cause issues, but it's still happening.
As for how often it happens, it varies... Sometimes once the entire day, other times it freezes every second startup.
The very first time it did freeze was during a system update. We set it up, created a user profile and launched a game, which prompted an update. However, because there was no progress bar showing on the screen (only a white screen with the Wii U logo on the bottom right), we decided it probably wasn't doing anything and pulled the plug after about fifteen minutes. It restarted okay, and the next update attempt went without error. There were a couple more updates after the first one and then we were able to launch the game. Besides the first crash, it has never frozen in-game, or anywhere else other than boot time.
I guess my question is: What do I need to do here? I will most likely have to give Nintendo a call, but I want to make sure I've tried everything I can before I do that. I'm using all the hardware and cables from the box. I was originally using a different HDMI cable, but switched to the included cable to see if that would solve it. We also have four older Wii remotes from our previous Wii console.
Is there anything else I can try?