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  • Author Author: genebren
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Blue Screen crash on Windows

genebren

I can't remember that last time that my system came crashing down, resulting in the blue screen.  It used to happen quite frequently back in the days that I was working on drivers and such, but it came crashing down today.  I don't know if my Windows 7 is upset that it is no longer supported by Microsoft, but I hope it was just some super freak occurrence, and I will be able to continue happily plugging along with my current hardware and software.

 

Anyone else experiences crashes on Windows7?  The only new software that I have been running is the Arduino IDE (in fact, I was editing code in the IDE when the system crashed), has this been known to crash the system?

 

I do think that this might be a good time to back everything to one of my network drives just in case. 

 

Thanks!

  • in reply to cstanton

    Shame on you Christopher for promising a solution with a link that goes to the home page of E14 Community. If in your past life you were a MS Windows support technician I can accept the foible. Who having worked with MS Windows products ever believed it would work the way it should.

     

    An Internet folk lore has it that Canadian Tire took a domain name holder to court to prevent them from registering the domain CrappyTire. Their argument was people called their brand that all the time.  I'm curious as to why MS technical support doesn't alias bluescreenofdeath in the domain name registry.

  • I used to support Windows machines as an IT Technician.

     

    There's a set of tools that you use to view and analyse the 'crash dumps' when your Microsoft Windows bluescreens, it's called Windbg - so useful, and it really should come with windows by default.

     

    Usually when I get windows errors 'out of the blue' it's due to a driver problem or hardware failure. Typically RAM or the storage. Unless I've been overclocking and then it's typically the CPU.

     

    Some say that installing Windows 10 still works if you use the installation media and type in your Windows 7 key.

  • in reply to genebren

    Gene,

     

    Glad you managed a recovery. Now to do some regular backups - daily - to your NAS.

     

    I just checked my earler blog about upgrades failing - I had upgraded to 1.8.10 of the Arduino IDE, together with the latest ESP8266 add on when I got all my  compilation failures. I then downgraded to version 1.8.8 and an earlier version of the ESP8266 add on, which I am still using. Who know whether there wa actually an unforseen interaction between W7 and 1.8.10? I am talking November 2019 and W7 support ceased in January 2020. Was 1.8.10 not tested against W7, simply because of its perceived imminent demise? Who knows?

     

    So, still using W7 on an internet connected machine!  Wow Gene, you are a braver man than I am!!!

     

    The current version of W10 is, of course, very different from W7, and also from W8, especially as far as UI is concerned. It's also more helpful to the mass user, but at the same time it makes aspects of the OS, which we oldies are used to tinkering with, a bit harder to find!! Aspects of the OS have been entirely rewritten and there are a number of extremely useful new features (as well as a lot of "bloatware"!).

     

    As well as potential security issues with W7 because of the cessation of MS support, other software suppliers will cease to maintain backward compatibility to W7 when they upgrade their products. It happened very quickly with some products when support for XP stopped.  For example, I was left with a very expensive (at the time) set of reference CDs, written in a format only understandable by the CD publisher's own software. The publisher did not upgrade to W7!. For a few years, I ran XP in a Virtual Machine on my W7 desktop, but eventually the info on the CDs became freely available on the Internet, so I abandoned the CDs, XP and the VM!

     

    Stay Safe

     

    Neil

  • in reply to neilk

    Neil,

     

    I did really well, as I have not been able to find any damage or lost files.  As for IDE, I am using 1.8.12.  Hopefully this is a current enough release and hopeful relatively problem free.

     

    When it comes to WIndows7, I can't see anywhere else to go, I played around with 8 and there is noway I want to move in that direction.  Being my primary computer, I need to keep this one connected to the web, so I guess I am living on the edge and hoping for the best.

     

    Thanks!

    Gene

  • Gene, thats tough. I hope you can recover it, or at worst find some backups!

     

    Have you recently upgraded to the latest version of Arduino IDE? I had problems with it and had to downgrade; didn't cause a BSOD, though!

     

    Did you connect your W7 machine to the Internet to get the download since Microsoft stopped supporting W7????

     

    I quarantined my old W7 machine on the last day of support. I wasn't able to upgrade it to W10, so I had to buy a new machine; I don't regret that: so much faster. The old machine still has some potential - when I have NOTHING else to do, I may install Linux on it and try and find out what the Linusxafficionados preach about

     

    Neil