Free Windows Vista/XP crash help

Tech Talk
#1

If you’re running Vista or XP and are not random / ugly:

I’m willing to do some minimal level of crash analysis for you. I’m best when dealing with multimedia issues, but I’ll generally try to look at anything.

If you’re hitting a crash on Vista or XP and want help:
On Vista: open the Start menu. Click All Programs. Select “Maintenance”. Select “Problems Reports and Solutions”. Click “View Problem History”. Look for the crash/error in question. Double-click the report in question. What is that data? (You can use “Copy to Clipboard” to easily include this data in your message.)

On XP: go to the Event Viewer in Administrative Tools (you can manually run this with the commandline ‘%windir%\system32\mmc.exe" “%windir%\SYSTEM32\eventvwr.msc” /s’ if you need to). Go to the Application log in Event Viewer. Look for the “Error” in that list - there should be two for your latest crash. The most recent one should have a “Fault bucket” number. What is that number? There will be another Error Event in that list that will have the Faulting Application - all of that information is also helpful.

Disclaimers
No warranties express or implied. I could be wrong, but if I can provide some general guidance, I’ll try to.
I’m speaking for myself only.
I don’t give a fuck about my OR your feelings about Microsoft or any other company. I’m just interested in making things work and helping a brother out.

Vista is surprisingly stable since it had an extra million hours of stress tests. XP will be less stable comparatively: that’s much less interesting to me to look at, but – I’ll take a look. I don’t know what my accuracy/help rate will be, but – hey, better than nothing, right?

Please note that if you do not have a Crash Bucket number (which you can only get by sending up the crash report), it will be much harder to assess your issue. HungApp crash buckets are also generally useless. (A developer might find WinDbG helpful to debug this crash given the DMP file, but that requires pretty high skill and I’m not going to touch / care about HungApp buckets.)

Preferably this is a crash in a Microsoft application - third party apps aren’t as interesting.

#2

hell preppy i thought about helping individuals out with tech issues as well since I’ve noticed recently that both you and I have been assisting them with defunct problems. You can count me in as far as Xp home /pro is concerned. Vista on the other hand, I have very few experience as the majority of clients are tailored to the aforementioned and as of now, are trying to run beta software on their vista setup which is continuously buggy.

#3

If there is to be some kind of IT Professionals thread then I may as well get on. My areas are networking, servers, and security. Mainly Windows 2003, 2k SP4, and XP Pro but I also mess around with some Linux apps for my switches and routers.

#4

ok im having some problems if you could help that would be great

i ran a Gens emu game and its freaked out and it was a good rom coz my friend played it on his computer

im on Windows xp

everytime i go to log on it says loading up windows on the blue screen but will not pull up the screen to type in my password

i tryed going in safe mode but that doesnt work either because it doesnt pull up the password screen

Im on Xp home sp2 most likely im pretty sure thats what it is.

#5

Hey Preppy, how familiar are you with Exchange Server 2000? How come there is a default registry value to shut down the system when the event viewer gets full? After knocking out the email system for my company I went and changed the registry key and greatly increased the Even Viewer log file size but I want to know if this problem still exists in 2007 or even in 2003 for Exchange.

#6

The Computer Help Thread should be for general computer issues.

I am ONLY interested in actual crashes here as found in the Event Viewer or Problem Reports and Solutions tools. If you don’t have crash data, it’s not a crash and I wouldn’t be able to do crash analysis.

It’s cool if nobody is crashing, but – I figured, sometimes solving those annoying crashes isn’t that hard if you get a dev to look at the stack, so – I might as well offer to help a brother out. <3