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.