How to Find Out What Caused Your Blue Screen of Death

Windows Vista is renowned for crashing again and again into the blue screen of death (BSOD). Usually we do not what caused it, and it is difficult to find out. However, do not threat! This article will show you how to find what was responsible for the crash and also locate it within the system! A BSOD usually relates to bad software configuration rather than bad hardware.

Usually when we get a BSOD the whole system will freeze. During this time, your system will make a memory dump of what happened.

In Control Panel, select System, and go into the advanced settings and the settings in the Startup and Recovery.

Here we have the nature of the dump file and select the kernel memory image

The image is stored by default in:

Default is% systemroot% \ Memory.dmp

Now we download the Debugging Tools for Windows, download from Microsoft. It supports a wide range of Windows versions.

Install debugging tools for Windows 32-bit version.

Download and install the tools, it is a 10 second process. After installation, we find in a new subfolder in the program directory, called debugging tools for Windows, which is located in the file windbg.exe

The debugger needs to build a variety of information about installed patches, SPs, drivers, etc. get.

Go to Files -> Symbol File Path

In the small window give the following command:

SRV * c: \ symbols * http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Now all the necessary information for debugging are loaded, of course, this all happens automatically.

Then we open the dump file:

Files -> Open Crash Dump

In the viewfinder give the path to the Memory.dmp and confirm by pressing Open. The debugger will start translating the dump for us.

Enter this in the command line:

! analyze-v

And execute the command with the Enter button.

The debugger will reveal the data after a short while. Once finished we will have information on what has caused the previous blue screen crash message. I have found in my case it is often the sptd.sys file which causes the crash. With all the detail displayed within this file, we can easily search google and find a fix for our problem. You may want to uninstall the particular module that may have caused the problem in the first place. Usually when we get a BSOD we cannot do anything, and we just restart our computer and hope it doesn't happen again. Well, now you have read this tutorial you can see that you can easily find out the cause and rectify the problem!