Blue Screen crash on Windows

RE: Blue Screen crash on Windows

cstanton — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 14:46:43 GMT

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.

RE: Blue Screen crash on Windows

neilk — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 16:11:50 GMT

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

RE: Blue Screen crash on Windows

colporteur — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 15:03:02 GMT

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.

RE: Blue Screen crash on Windows

dubbie — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 09:41:55 GMT

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

RE: Blue Screen crash on Windows

ankur608 — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 23:31:31 GMT

Or maybe,

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256335/google-chrome-windows-against-zero-day-vulnerabilities-update

Recent ThreatWire post by Shannon,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=thBk7fQmV-E

RE: Blue Screen crash on Windows

Gough Lui — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 23:01:13 GMT

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

RE: Blue Screen crash on Windows

dougw — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 22:45:44 GMT

Backups only work if you do them religiously, because the big crash is bound (by Murphy's law) to happen when you are least prepared.

I run Task Manager continuously and it shows over 125 background processes running that I didn't explicitly start myself. That is a lot of code that could behave badly, or not play well with others.

I don't even know what half of them are doing, even though the processes seem plausible, why some suddenly need a bunch of resources is a mystery. Some of them I know I don't really want running, but getting rid of them is tougher than getting rid of a virus.