Surface Book Performance Base - Crashing following MS Update

On 12 January I rebooted my Surface Book with Performance Base, and was greeted with "Please wait while Windows 10 performs updates - 0%..." screen.  When the system restarted, under the "SURFACE" white text on black boot screen was a colored progress bar which is usually not present after windows updates, so I assume this was the Spectre/Meltdown firmware update.

However, since then my system has been incredibly unstable - in fact, the first crash was about 5 minutes after the Update was installed (interestingly, after the first crash a different colored progress bar was under the "SURFACE" white text on black boot screen - looking at the update notes, it was supposed to reboot the system twice but the second reboot was the result of a crash).

The crashes occur at least every hour and only twice have they been accompanied by an error message (one of the two was "Paged fault in non-paged area"), but the rest of the time the crash is just the display going black (occasionally accompanied by a buzz from the audio speakers).  The system is still running, as it requires a 10 second hold down of the power button to switch off.

My guess is that one of the firmware updates is either not optimized for performance base or was installed incorrectly, but unfortunately I don't have a recent restore point to roll back.  It's incredibly frustrating to try and get any work done (in fact, it crashed while I was trying to submit this question).

Is there any way to diagnose the fault without doing a complete system restore - I'm travelling in an area of very poor internet quality, so wiping the system and reinstalling all the programs is pretty much out of the question.