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minidump

Debugging Windows crashes with minidumps? Not at Lenovo

Like many of you, my copies of Windows XP crash with the now-classic "blue screen of death" (BSOD). When this happened a couple times recently to a new ThinkCentre A61 tower, I called Lenovo tech support. As the title of this posting suggests, it did not go well.

When Windows XP crashes, the default behavior is to create a minidump, a small file (only 88K) with a summary of, hopefully, the most important information about the failure. I wrote about minidumps back in November (see Dealing with software crashes, Part 2). If your copy of Windows has crashed (… Read more

Dealing with software crashes, Part 2

The first part of this posting on dealing with software crashes covered preventing the leakage of personal information, portable applications, and controlling the programs that run automatically when Windows starts up. Here we look at dumps, event logs, and disk checking, but first, we pick up on the topic of drivers.

Driver Verifier

In Windows, the term "driver" refers to software used by the operating system to control the hardware in the computer. Each piece of hardware (sound, video, printer) has an associated driver program.

The last topic in the previous posting was an airplane analogy to illustrate … Read more