Blue Screen of Death Survival Guide: Every Error Explained | Hacker News Reader

Blue Screen of Death Survival Guide: Every Error Explained

maximumpc.com

21 pointsaps-sids5 comments

There's some useful information in there, though if you need it professionally hopefully you already know most of it. This may be a good article to point the "power users" you know to.

One thing that I didn't really see covered is identifying problem components/drivers. For that, you can either follow the assorted online instructions for debugging memory dumps, or you can simply use Nir Sofer's Blue Screen View from http://nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html - it's much simpler.

And it's probably worth checking whether your Windows boxen are configured for full memory dumps or minidumps - most of the time you want minidumps which will keep multiple versions taking very little space. Most folks reading HN probably don't need 8+GB full memory dumps if their Windows boxes crash.

When I was working desktop support, Blue Screen View and the Microsoft debugger turned out to be rather valuable tools when trying to find out which component or driver was causing issues. As an example, I had an issue where a buggy driver for Symantec Network Protection was causing machines to crash. No matter how many support tickets or emails I exchanged with headquarters IT, they didn't believe me. It wasn't until I went to them with minidumps and reports from Blue Screen View that they finally did and pushed out an update that fixed it.

There is a far more complete list of BSOD STOP codes, including links to relevant MSDN articles, at http://www.carrona.org/bsodindx.html

The Maximum PC article seems to be a reasonable troubleshooting guide from the brief look I had. In my experience mystery computer problems are (in rough order, not limited to Windows, YMMV) memory, power supply, physical problems (connectors, etc), and drivers.

I got BSOD last week while doing some 3D rendering work. That was once in 4 years.

Why is this big news? I haven't had a blue screen of death in like 5 years--which I think is pretty average.

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