How in the Tech

Getting to the bottom of blue screen errors

By Adam Myers ⋅ February 9, 2010 ⋅ Tags: System Administration

To be fair, blue screens occur rather infrequent compared to just a few years back. Windows, as a platform, has become quite stable and mature irregardless of the negative opinions that still linger. The reality is, Windows XP melded into a solid operating system – so much so that Microsoft is having a heck of a time convincing consumers and businesses alike to abandon the release and upgrade. Vista and 7 are built off much of that same solid foundation and by and large, share the same functional stability. However, blue screens do still occur and it remains just as unsettling as always.

Briefly, blue screen of death is an error screen that Windows throws when it encounters a critical error that it is unable to cope with – the computer crashes and must be restarted. During the earlier days of Windows, Microsoft was just a guilty of crashing the system as anything else. However, today blue screens are rarely a direct result of poor Microsoft coding. Rather, the errors are generally the result of malfunctioning hardware, either physically or through their driver layer. Applications are rarely able to bring the entire system down – a shift from the Windows 95 days for example.

Typically there are two courses of action should you receive the blue screen; you either reboot and pretend nothing happened (while hoping it’s just a fluke) or you take the STOP ERROR and throw it into Google and work from the results. Today I’m showing you a third option: BlueScreenView from the guys at Nirsoft.

BlueScreenView is a free and portable Windows application that can greatly aid in the debugging of what exactly caused the error. It’s not magical and what it will provide will still require a bit of elbow grease on your part but it is still an essential piece of software for any enthusiast. BlueScreenView can analyze the mini-memory dumps that are saved at the time of the crash. What makes the software shine is it’s ability to correlate the affected memory address with the faulting driver or module. Version and vendor information is also displayed for the possibly offending driver. Lastly, BlueScreenView isn’t limited to analyzing dumps of the local computer – it can diagnose dumps across the local network, assuming appropriate access is available.

BlueScreenView isn’t a miracle worker but it can be used to work miracles.