Sunday, January 20, 2013

Stop PC System Crashes in Minutes not Days

After you've tested your disk, your memory, ran all sorts of virus and malware search and destroy tools and every test comes up clean.... and you still have system crashes! Well you might just have a driver problem. But what driver? There may be a hundred or more.

Finding tools to do all the appropriate tests online may take the better part of an afternoon if you don't already have them handy, and then running the test may take days depending on how thorough they are. I've learned my lesson. Before I go through all that I will follow the simply outline below to see if system crashes are caused by a missing, corrupt, outdated, or wrong driver.

 First, thanks to NetWork World for publishing the following article http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/041105-windows-crash.html. Read the article for details.

In my case I found that a Nvidia driver had somehow gone bad. By following the procedure outlined in the article I was able to locate the culprit and stop the crashes in minutes, after having spent days doing needless system testing.

You will need to download WinDbg at the Microsoft site here. After installing the tools run WinDbg. The WinDbg GUI is not pretty, and as any debugger there are a lot of complex commands, but by following the simple instructions written by Dirk Smith in the article I found my answer, that is, which driver was causing the crash. I went to the Nvidia site for the download, reinstalled the driver and my problems were over.

One catch for me was that my crashes were not producing dump files even though it was set up to do so under My Computer > properties > advanced  > startup and recovery > system failure. Of course, without a dump file of the crash you cannot use the debugger. During my prior analysis of memory usage I noted that I had virtual memory page files on all drives except the C: drive. I did that because I didn't want VM competing with other activities on C:. The dump file was supposed to go to C:/windows. Just as a shot in the dark I created a pagefile on C: too, and wha-la, during the next crash a dump file was created. Coincidence?

System crashes can be deeply mysterious, but by following this outline you can detect what driver may be causing the problem or at least potentially eliminate drivers as the corrupt. The debugger can do a lot more of course and might even detect other sources of a crash. But that's too deep of a dive for this post.

Good luck! Don't let crashes keep you done!

Microsoft's Autoruns to the Rescue



It has always been painful to determine just what services, apps, drivers, ddl, etc are loaded on your PC, where they are loaded from, and when.

How about finding old apps that didn't completely uninstall, or worse, apps that you didn't even know were installed?

How about finding new additions which may be causing a problem, or, what can be removed if your PC has been slowing down.

Microsoft's Autoruns in the answer to all of the above and more.

Autoruns can be found at the MS technet site.

The image above shows the app running and what is being loaded at startup from just about every location possible. The first screenfull shows items from the registry at HKLM\Software\microsoft\windows\currentVersion\run. The 'run' key in the registry is one of my such places that apps are started from when a PC boots. Autoruns shows all the locations that are commonly used and many not so common locations.


You might be surprised just what you see when you fire up the tool.

My PC is going on seven years old and in that time many pieces of software have been loaded with and without my knowledge, many uninstalled leaving junk behind (or not really uninstalled at all), and many services and drivers that just don't need to startup automatically or at all.

Finding and removing old junk is one use. Another important use is just to take a snapshot of your PC using this tool when it is healthy. You can then compare a later snapshot (after you start to have problems or slowdowns) and determine what has changed on your PC.

It is easy to turn off an app or service etc just by checking the box on the far left. I would be careful about deleting them however. When turning things off do them one or two at a time, then restart your PC to insure that it is working OK. If you have a lot of stuff to turn off ( I turned of over thirty items), then do it over a period of days, making sure everything is working fine. If you don't mind bouncing your PC many times you can make quite a few changes in one day.

If it ain't broke don't fix it. But if you start to have problems then this tool can easily tell you what has changed and how to systematically determine which of the changes are causing the problem.