In: Categories » Computers and technology » Windows Vista » TROUBLESHOOTING WINDOWS VISTA STOP ERRORS AND BSOD's
| First & Foremost, see if a System Restore or Last Known Good Configuration to resolve this issue. Else, then run your ant-virus and anti-spyware and your PC Junk/Registry Cleaner. After this, Run the Windows Check Disk Utility. Then try to identify if you've made any software or hardware change or modification. In most cases, software is the victim and not the cause of BSOD's. So don’t rule out hardware problems. It could be damaged hard disks, defective physical RAM, overheated CPU chips or anything else ! Check if you can see a driver name in the error details. If you can, then simply disabling, removing, or rolling back that driver to an earlier version can help solve that problem. Network interface cards, disk controllers and Video Adapters are the culprits, most often. Check your memory. Use Vista's Memory Diagnostic Tool. Go to Control Panel and type "memory" in the Search box. Under Administrative Tools, click Diagnose Your Computer’s Memory Problems. In the Windows Memory Diagnostics Tool, shown here, select one of the options. Check your system BIOS carefully Is an update available from the manufacturer of the system or motherboard? Check the BIOS documentation carefully; resetting all BIOS options to their defaults can sometimes resolve an issue caused by overtweaking. Check if you are you low on system resources? Sometimes a critical shortage of Disk Space or RAM can cause BSOD's. Check if system file has been damaged? Work in Safe Mode, as only the core drivers and services are activated. If your system starts in Safe Mode but not normally, you very likely have a problem driver. Try running Device Manager in Safe Mode and uninstalling the most likely suspect. Or run System Restore in Safe Mode. For analyzing Crash Dumps, this MSDN print-link and this DumpAnalysis Links may help you. WHAT TO DO IF YOU SUSPECT THAT A DRIVER IS CAUSING BSOD's. If you suspect that a buggy device driver is at fault for the BSOD's, call upon a lesser known but powerful trouble shooting tool called as the Driver Verifier Manager ! Enter verifier in the search bar and hit enter to bring up Verifier.exe . Run As Administrator. This tool helps you to actually identify the flawed driver. Now select "Create Standard Settings". Next, select the type of drivers you want to verify. Unsigned drivers are a likely cause of problems, as they are created for older versions of Windows. Click Next, till completion. Driver Verifier Manager works in the following manner. Instead of your machine throwing up a undecipherable BSOD at you, at any time, you can make Driver Verifier to stop your computer at start up, with a BSOD which will explain the actual problem, rather accurately! You can then choose to resolve the problem by either updating, rolling back or uninstalling the offending driver. Please do note that in the rare eventuality the the Driver Verifier Manager does find a non-conforming driver, there could be possibility that it may not be the offending one. So do exercise extreme caution. Regard the identified Driver/s with suspicious and exercise your best judgment in such case. Having narrowed down to the problematic Driver, you have 3 options : Update, Roll Back or Uninstall the Device Driver. To do that, open Device Manager. Open the properties dialog box for the device, and use the following buttons on the Driver tab to perform maintenance tasks: Update Driver : This will start the Hardware Update Wizard. Source: winvistaclub
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