Diagnosing a Blue Screen of Death Error in Windows

For many years now the famous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) has been the ultimate indication that something disastrous has happened to make your computer die, but how useful is the information in the BSoD and the respective crash dump file that Windows produces?

The best article I ever found explaining the BSoD in depth is here on the Microsoft website, however it’s quite technical and doesn’t discuss how to actually troubleshoot a problem.  The crash dump file is just technical details of what was being held in the computer’s memory at the time of the crash, and this will include details on every driver and service that was loaded, and every piece of software that was running.

The most useful pieces of information are to be found on the BSoD itself and are highlighted on the screenshot below.  These are the BSoD error name, the stop error code and the name of the driver or service that has failed (this last one might not always appear).  Performing a search online for these in conjunction, and the long string codes after the main stop error can give much more information, can help considerably in diagnosing where the problem lies.

But is it even easier than this to diagnose a BSoD stop error?  Commonly a BSoD will be caused by something that has recently changed, such as a Windows Update where a new hardware driver has been installed.  Windows has to support completely limitless combinations of hardware and software and so, no matter how much testing Microsoft might put hardware drivers, and software patches through before releasing them on Windows Update, there’s never any guarantee that a particular driver, service update or patch won’t cause problems with your particular mix of hardware and software.

One of the things I highlight in my book Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out is the importance of working through a problem to figure out what’s new or what has changed on a computer system.  If you don’t change anything then it’s extremely unlikely that a system that runs perfectly stably for weeks, months or even years will suddenly produce an error later on (unless a critical file has become corrupt after an event such as a sudden restart).  So it’s very likely then that something new or changed will have cause the error, perhaps a graphics card driver as these are embedded deep within the Windows system.

There are ways around this, such as running a System Restore to roll back the system to before changes were made.  You can then, for example, check Windows Update to see if it tried to install any drivers and if necessary, right-click on them to hide them completely.  If the system is really unstable you can use Safe Mode or Windows Safe Boot mode to start the computer in a reduced functionality mode.

One other scenario however that can commonly trigger a BSoD is a computer’s fans becoming clogged with dust, especially for the processor and power supply.  You should always clean (carefully!) the inside of your computer on a regular basis and clean out accumulated dust to make sure that the computer doesn’t overheat.

Armed with this information it shouldn’t be too difficult to diagnose a BSoD and repair the problem that has caused it.  Whatever happens you can be sure that you will not be the first person ever to have encountered this problem, and usually you will find an article or forum post online where somebody is detailing exactly what the issue is.  Failing that, a little bit of lateral thinking and diagnosis usually saves the day.

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Microsoft Releases Blue Screen Rootkit Detection Tool About the Author:Mike Halsey is a Microsoft MVP for "Windows Expert". He is also the author of Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out from Microsoft Press and the Windows 7 Power Users Guide, a how-to guide for non-technical Windows users on how to get the best out of Microsoft's new operating system, with step-by-step and quick guides. You can follow Mike on Facebook, Twitter or on his own website The Long ClimbAuthor: Mike Halsey MVP, Sunday January 29, 2012 -
Tags:blue screen of death, bsod

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Attaching an Alert Task to a Windows Error

The Windows Event Viewer in one of the most useful, yet most under used features of the operating system.  Accessed by typing event into the Start Menu search box, or through the Computer Management Console it logs everything that happens in the OS, including warnings, errors and critical failures (sudden power losses or immediate restarts excepted).  When you have an error Windows will usually alert you by displaying a message on the screen, or by displaying the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.  Sometimes though a device driver, software package or Windows component will fail silently in the background, and you won’t be aware of the failure until you come to use it.

A couple of examples of this are a printer driver that fails silently, and you won’t notice until the next time you go to print something, or a networking component fails taking down a Homegroup or Internet Access.  Fortunately Windows does include a handy wizard utility to alert you when something happens silently in the background, and you access it in the Event Viewer.

The first step is to find the original error.  This isn’t actually as difficult as it sounds as events are all clearly labelled with plain English explanations.  The details will include the name of the driver, application or service which has stopped working and it’s normally not too difficult to find what you’re looking for as you can further drill down by the appropriate date and time.  There will never be too many errors and warnings on your system which again makes it easier to find the specific error event you are looking for.

Once you have found the appropriate error, double click to open it and all instances of the error will be shown.  Here is where we we attach a task to this event to let us know when it occurs next.  Why might we want to do this?  It could be that the error is caused by a conflict with another piece of software or hardware, or that some other force external to the failed component is causing the problem.  Attaching a task and alerting the user to the error can help you to diagnose the problem because, especially if it’s happening regularly you ought to be able to see a pattern.

In the right hand panel of the Event Viewer for a specific event you will see the option to Attach [a] Task to This Event and this is what you should click.  There are several things you can do, for instance run a program.  You could have a PowerShell or other script to report on the error.  Windows contains the command line WEVTUTIL which can be used to export the details of events from the Event Viewer as a text file, and you can read more about how you can use this command here.

You can also send an email, but note that this will only work if you have an email client such as Microsoft Outlook installed and configured.  What we want to do though is alert the user with a message.

The wizard really coiuldn’t be simpler and will allow you to set the title and content of a dialog message box.  For instance you might set the title as “Component Failure Alert!” and the message as “Please stop what you’re doing and phone IT, a component has failed and we need to know exactly what was happening and what you were doing on your computer the instant this message appeared.”

In short, attaching tasks to the event viewer can be incredibly useful, especially if you use Command or PowerShell scripts to automatically report on the problem, and the email system to then send the file on to someone.  It a great way for an IT department to be able to detect, diagnose and find a solution to the problem without the end user having to be too involved in the process, and given that tasks can be exported and installed on multiple machines quite simply this is a Windows feature that I’m surprised isn’t used much more often.

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Lookup Windows Error Codes Offline About the Author:Mike Halsey is a Microsoft MVP for "Windows Expert". He is also the author of Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out from Microsoft Press and the Windows 7 Power Users Guide, a how-to guide for non-technical Windows users on how to get the best out of Microsoft's new operating system, with step-by-step and quick guides. You can follow Mike on Facebook, Twitter or on his own website The Long ClimbAuthor: Mike Halsey MVP, Tuesday January 24, 2012 -
Tags:event viewer, Windows

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