Advanced troubleshooting tips: Windows XP and Vista

It’s the worst of PC problems.

One moment you’re deep in thought, application windows open all across your desktop as you work on an important project and then, in an instant, it’s all over.

The screen turns blue, a cryptic error message appears, the PC reboots and you have lost everything.

Hours of work, gone.

After a short pause for swearing, throwing and breaking things, the chances are you’ll want to know more about these blue screen errors (aka BSOD for ‘blue screen of death’), in particular what caused this one so you can stop it happening again.

But the typical advice you’ll find online may not be much use. Common recommendations to ‘use system restore’, ‘reduce the number of start-up programs’ or ‘clean the Registry’ sound reasonable enough, but require plenty of time and effort and only solve a small proportion of BSOD crashes.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though.

Follow our advice and a quick, simple procedure will in many cases identify exactly which driver or application was responsible for the crash, so you can update or remove it and be 100 per cent sure that the problem has been fixed.

Best of all, the tools you need are free, and easy to use.

No matter what your technical knowledge of Windows innards, you really can have a more stable and reliable PC.

Windows error reporting
Windows XP introduced an error-reporting system where crash information would be sent to a central Microsoft database, which would then offer possible solutions.

It was expanded in Windows Vista and is a good starting point for potential crash solutions – assuming it is switched on and configured.

In XP, right-click My Computer and select Properties, Advanced, then Error Reporting.

Ensure the Enable Error Reporting option is selected and both the Windows Operating System and Programs boxes are checked, then click Choose Programs and select the All Programs option.

You should now be given the option to send an error report to Microsoft following a crash, and if this matches a known problem you may see a message with a link to a potential fix.

Windows Vista improves on this with a redesigned error-handling system that is much more likely to record the details of a BSOD.

And better still, it maintains a database of your crashes, so you can check for solutions to those past BSODs.

Click Control Panel, System, Maintenance, Problem Reports and Solutions, then Check For New Solutions to give this a try.

Vista will fire off details of your errors to Microsoft, then come back with details on updates that might fix the problem.

The Windows Vista Reliability Monitor can also be useful, as it displays major errors and software installations on the same graph.

If all your recent problems started when you installed a particular application then it may be visible here.

Click Start, type perfmon.exe and press Enter, then click Reliability Monitor to view your own personal System Stability Chart and look for potential clues.

Error message
If the standard error reporting tools aren’t helpful then next you should to take a closer look at the error message itself.

Windows makes this tricky by rebooting a second or two after displaying the error, but this is easily changed.

Right-click Computer and select Properties, Advanced [System Settings], Startup and Recovery Settings, then check the System Failure box. Ensure the ‘Automatically restart’ box is clear and click OK.

Encounter a BSOD after this and Windows will stop at the error screen and give you time to read it.

If you’re lucky, this may name a file where it says the problem occurred, in which case make a note of it and run a Google search for the file later.

Unfortunately, you can’t always trust what the BSOD error message says.

Let’s suppose you have a buggy device driver that overwrites some key Windows data in memory.

This might result in the Windows kernel crashing later, perhaps with the error message pointing a finger at NTOSKRNL, but the real culprit – the faulty driver – won’t even rate a mention.

Be cautious, then. If the BSOD error points to a file that happens to belong to some application or driver you installed just before the crashes started, then that sounds like a promising lead.

By all means look for upgrades, re-install it or remove the program entirely, and your crashes might go away.

But if a Google search tells you the file is a core Windows component – nt, ntoskrnl, win32k, hal, ntfs or similar – or an application that you have had for a long time and are positive is working well, then the BSOD error message may simply be wrong.

That’s something you can check with a free utility that provides a more comprehensive analysis of the crash.

Windows debugging tools

When a BSOD occurs Windows will normally save all the relevant areas of memory to a crash dump file.

These files are mainly useful to developers, who analyse them to help figure out why their programs crash.

But you can make use of crash dump files, too.

Start by downloading and installing the free Windows Debugging Tools from the Microsoft website.

The debugger will download symbols to help it decode your crash dump files, and you’ll need to create a folder to store these.

We would recommend C:\Symbols, unless you already have a folder of the same name.