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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!

  • Some a few non-intrusive tests like scanning the hard drive for bad sectors and a mem86 tests to overwatch the memory. They rarely point to the problem but the first time you don't do it, you discover it was the issue.

  • I must admit that nowadays when older computers (laptops only recently) start to get a bit flaky, it's time to get a new laptop. They are always faster, brighter, better (in some ways if not all). I have had my current laptop for over two years now without any problems. Still, I do fancy a new one anyway.

     

    Dubbie

  • in reply to Gough Lui

    Good point.

    When older machines start to get flakey, it is time to reseat all the ram modules.

  • Take a photo of the BSOD - note any driver names and the type of BSOD. Sometimes drivers become corrupted or conflict with each other, sometimes older software and new patches don't play well either. Sometimes you will get a hint if it is consistent - whenever you perform X, or it always references the same drivers. This is especially relevant if you've added any new hardware to the system since the supporting drivers could be at fault.

     

    But more likely is that ageing of components may result in system instability especially in older machines. These usually manifest themselves as more random occurrence with varying messages. Think of drying capacitors inside power supplies increasing ripple voltage on the main voltage rails, reducing the margin for error and increasing instability. Or the same thing happening on motherboard CPU VRMs. It could be a thermal issue with dust clogging your CPU cooler etc, reducing the safe operating window. Even silicon-based solid-state circuits can degrade over time, strongly related to temperature, so if you have a bad bit of RAM causing corruption, that could certainly cause all manner of BSODs.

     

    But there are also random BSODs which are not symptomatic of anything particularly wrong - e.g. after a power transient causes partial RAM corruption, after running for a very long time and random uncorrected RAM corruption (esp in non-ECC systems) has occurred (e.g. due to charged particles, rowhammer attacks). It's the nature of the beast ...

     

    I normally see one perhaps once every year on decent hardware (that I've overclocked properly) - and closer to once every week-to-month on hardware that's a bit borderline ...

     

    - Gough