TIPS & TRICKS: BSOD's

Given the advancement of Windows in recent years, I don't tend to see as many blue screens any more. Under normal operating situations, Windows has become much more stable relative to previous versions. Nevertheless, blue screens have not completely gone away. Here's a case in point:

Last night I spent some time on the phone with a client on troubleshooting the cause of their blue screen problem. For those of you wondering "What's a blue screen?", a blue screen is, generally, a serious problem with the computer that is evidenced by a blue screen and white writing. Usually, the writing has some cryptic messages that allude to what the possible problem, though they are usually undecipherable by the normal user. There might be information pertaining to some sort of physical memory dump, which was the case last night.

As I was going through the possible reasons why a blue screen would occur, I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if this were listed somewhere for people to find. Here are the basic steps that I took last night. Since I was only on the phone with them, they came in the form of questions:

1. Did you recently install any new hardware (i.e RAM, video card, USB device, replacement HD, etc.)?
2. Did you recently install any new software (i.e. new Adobe Acrobat reader, new plug-in from a website, freeware, etc.)?
3. Did you start using any software installed before that was not previously used until recently?

Often times, hardware vendors will now include hardware utilities that scan the machine's components for problems. My client last night was working on a Dell. Recent Dell machines will include a boot partition that includes such a utility. I instructed him on how to get to that utility and run it to test for hardware problems.

In my experience, a good percentage of the time, these steps will usually take you to the solution. However, there may be times when this is not enough. This will require that you want to make sure that you have the information from the blue screen copied down for further research, either by you or your friendly neighborhood computer tech.

As a side note, my client also had a problem with a Eudora install and losing sent messages. We haven't come up with a definitive answer as to whether these two were related events, but I tend to like to keep events separate and troubleshoot as such until I find evidence that supports otherwise. His problem may have been with an installation of Mcafee Security Center corrupting the mailboxes. Fortunately, we were able to recover the files because Eudora was smart enough to create backup mailboxes.