Is Good Stuff

Today we are going to talk about the infamous Blue Screen of Death or known for short as BSOD. Microsoft named them as Stop errors designed to safeguard the system if the system encounters condition that compromises safe system operation. Ironically, I dont feel much of a pain when I was diagnosing BSOD for third party pcs however, I can get extremely desperate and frustrated if that BSOD happened to me.

Most of the lazy newbies tech support out there they will do the same routine which always ends up backing up your data and had your harddrive formatted later to find out the problem still persist. Usually when a BSOD occurs, it stays for a second before the PC immediately restarts the problem is, is displaying message in a non-end-user / layman language. Even, tech support staff are having trouble deciphering the error message otherwise, they will be the One (Matrix) – joking. Secondly, the error message is not stored anywhere for later analysis and we may forget to jot down the screen info.

Ever wonder why Neo is needed in Matrix, coz he sees and understand BSOD codes o_O

Today, we are going to do some modification to Windows so that the BSOD actually helps in diagnosing errors. To get around it, one has to disable the auto pc-restart option from the StartUp & System Recovery settings. Knowing the error code, can help identify the problem/solution.

Disabling Automatic Restart
To do that goto Control Panel > System And Maintenance > System > Advanced System Settings > Advanced tab > Under Startup And Recovery > Click Settings > Clear the Automatically Restart check box > click OK. See picture below. Notice the system stores the dmp error logs in %SystemRoot%\MEMORY.DMP. This is the file that contains the error message and codes. You’ll need to analyse this file next.

Analysing the Crash Log

You can also get your BSOD auto-analysed at the Microsoft Online Crash Analysis at http://oca.microsoft.com/en/Welcome.aspx.

Know the cause first before, rushing into conclusion. Backup is still compulsory but usually, format isn’t necessary. You can install this tool from Microsoft called Debugging Tools to try to help find the cause. There’s even a damn good site for all your stop error reference http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm. Most of the documented BSOD are related to faulty drivers or a hardware driver or system service requested data that was not in memory e.g. STOP 0x000000D1 or DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_OR_EQUAL.

Removing the driver (safe mode) and installing a newer ones will solve the problem. Restore point may come in handy too.

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