What are some steps that you usually take? Are there any good ways of finding out what they mean etc.?
For example I have gotten these ones where it pretty much only says “IRQ less or equal to” (or something like that) which I must say, doesn’t really tell me much! Another one I got more recently was something in the lines of “Some application changed some files it shouldn’t have”. And there were of course no information on what files, or what application…
What can you do?
Solution:
Firstly, ensure that minidumps are being taken.
- Click Start
- Click Run (only if using XP, otherwise you can type straight into the Vista/7 search box)
- Type wmic recoveros set DebugInfoType = 3 and click OK. This does the same as going into System Properties and enabling the Small Memory Dump option there. Use whichever method you prefer.
There is free software called BlueScreenView which then allows you to delve into the minidump files and get an idea of exactly what files might have caused the blue screen to happen. I.e. whether it was a graphics driver, a sound driver, a program or whatever.
If you want to manually analyse the crash dump files using Microsoft’s debugging tools, you will still need to follow the steps at the top to enable minidumps.