So, how many different BSODs have you had on your Vista laptop?

I just had another one, and I'm no longer entirely sure whether I should laugh or cry at the (lack of) Vista stability on my two and half months old laptop .

Alright, it hasn't exactly been a nightmare, and there are lots of aspects I love about Vista (coming from around six years with Windows 2000 on several desktop PCs), but these damn blue screens of death are really starting to annoy me rather severely. In fact I don't really dare using my laptop for gaming at all (good thing I've got an XBox 360 - and a PS3 in the mail ), as half of them have happened during gaming.

I expect application crashes from time to time, but I had really hoped - and almost expected - that Windows crashes and BSODs were a thing of the past. I hadn't seen one on Windows 2000 since around 2002.

Here's what I've gotten so far over the last ten weeks.

(3x) 0x0000008E: KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
0x0000009F: DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE
0x00000010e: SPIN_LOCK_NOT_OWNED
(2x) 0x000000D1: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
0x000000C2: BAD_POOL_CALLER

Not much apparant rhyme or reason here, is there?

I seriously hope SP1 does a lot for stability. I may only have gotten less than one BSOD a week on average - but that's still one too many.

I'm sure all my external devices (monitor, two disks, wireless mouse, Wacom tablet etc.) aren't exactly doing much to improve stability (at least one or two of the BSODs listed system files that seemed to point to the external storage - though I'm 99.9% sure this was a driver/system call conflict rather than a hardware issue), but that's not really much of a comfort as it really just should be working - barring hardware issues, but the way my system is otherwise performing, I seriously doubt I've got any of those.

 

I rarely ever get BSODs, and I've been using Vista on a Macbook Pro for almost half a year now. I've also run it on a Gateway Desktop and an old Alienware. I've used a bluetooth wireless Wacom as well without any BSODs.

What I DO get BSODs with are certain external devices, almost always USB.

Sometimes plugging in my Razer DeathAdder mouse after startup will cause a BSOD (about 1/30th of the time). Also, sometimes the same occurs with my external TV tuner (OnAir Creator) about 1/30th of the time.

My advice to you is to try to minimize USB changes after your computer is active. I've never had a BSOD with a USB device if the component was already inserted before startup.

Otherwise, I can't think of any particular reason your computer should be BSODing so often. Good luck.

 

i lost the count...SP1 RC hasnt done anything for me atleast

 

i don't get any from normal operation or gaming. nor sticking in usb devices. i only occasionally get it when i plug in my moniter after it is turned on, but that is because i am too lazy to download drivers for it.

@OP - i assume you have updated drivers and installed the windows updates.

 

Not one BSOD after countless driver updates, installs, and overclocks (ok well I had random crashes during overclocks...but that's normal when you're looking for the sweet spot).

@OP - That's got to be a driver issue. I'd go back to stock drivers and start updating one by one until you find the culprit.

 

believe it or not i have seen only one and it was my fault on 2 notebooks running home premium
1 a sony cr303
2 a thinkpad z60t
sony had a dual core and 2 giggs
thinkpad has pentium m 1.73 with 2 gigs
both have been pretty flawless so far

 

None. I haven't had a BSOD since the Windows ME/98 era. When programs crash on XP or Vista, it's unlikely to bring the whole system down. You get the "Program has stopped responding" message.

 

Not a single BSOD (and I do my best believe me) but.... I had someone a while back ask me what I thought as he was having several and his system would hang. His solution was to remove some external devices on startup, one of which I believe was a external drive.

 

If I recall correctly, the only driver I've updated from stock drivers (they were, and I think still are in most cases, the latest official Asus G1S drivers) was the graphics card driver, but after getting a BSOD in the first game I fired up, I uninstalled it again and went back to the original one from the Asus site.

The thing I find a bit odd is that I've gotten this range of different BSODs. The most frequent ones looks like they might indeed be directly to a questionable driver or two (a bit hard to narrow them down though, for the reasons specified above), but then there's the 0x10e error, which I believe was a DVD drive error in connection with a game, and the 0x9F error related to a sleep or hibernation attempt if I'm not much mistaken.

A clean Vista install from the recovery DVD is out of the question until either (or both) SP1 doesn't turn out to be any better, or the crashes become more frequent.
These days I absolutely hate the process of getting a load of applications and utilities installed, correctly set up (which goes for Windows itself as well) and assorted work and hobby related files restored from back up - so that's a last resort.

All those USB devices may very well be the problem here as pointed out. Unfortunately my two WD disks won't power down after shutting down the computer unless I unplug the USB cables (and one of them interferes with the boot process - which it did on my old desktop PC as well. I only have this one hooked up when I'm running backups though), so it's often difficult to avoid a bit of cable swapping while Vista is running.
I've yet to see a BSOD happen shortly after (un)plugging a device though.
One or several of them also prevents Vista from using sleep mode properly most times, though that works perfectly fine if there are no external devices.

Anyway, as already mentioned - assuming there's nothing wrong with the hardware, Vista really should be able to handle all this without crashing. So I guess there's nothing to do but keep my fingers crossed for SP1 and other future updates.

 

Yep, an application crash is extremely unlikely to take down the OS - but as far as I know most (non-faulty hardware) BSODs are caused by things like driver conflicts or assorted faulty kernel system calls.
Apparantly I'm getting a few too many of those .

 

haven't gotten any single BSOD since I got my laptop last August (Vista Ultimate, clean install, no Turbo Memory)... I keep my fingers crossed.

 

no BSOD with vista, but a couple with XP in the last month.

 

with vista between november and early december i had BSODS, i soon realizd mcafee firewall was conflicting with windows firewall. turned mcafee firewall off and walah, no more BSODs.

im a regular user and a light gamer, dont do any such tweaking or what but im happy with vista

 

None. Neither on x86, nor on x64.

 

Actually, you might want to run MemTest86+ and test all of your RAM. That might be the cause of some of those BSODs if the RAM is slightly faulty.

 

Never had one. Ever. On XP or vista. Heck, never got one of my 98 se computer either.

 

None, I've never had one on any computer.

 

I must admit...

ZERO.

 

I can't believe the amount of posters here who have not seen a BSOD atleast once or twice in XP or Vista, I find this quite shocking . Back in my 98/2000/XP days I used to attract the BSOD like a magnet and it would only happen after updating drivers (buggy drivers?). I remember for a few crazy months when I was running XP I would be just minding my business typing a document and wham BSOD for no reason when the problem got too bad I would just re-install windows. However I must admit vista is more stable BSOD wise than XP, since I started using vista (8 months ago) I have only had like 5 BSOD and believe me my ram is just fine memtest never finds any faults.

I also have the BSOD screensaver installed and when it runs it freaks alot of people out

 

On Vista -

I had a video card go bad and it was blue screen galore. Before and after that week of horror, i've had no other BSOD associated with any other problem in Vista.

Pre-SP1 to pre-SP1, more so in XP.

Regards,
Paolo

 

I had a few back in the beginning of vista, but that was spysweepers fault. Since they fixed their problem, i have seen 0 bsod's on all 3 of my vista machines.

 

BSOD count for me:

Vista: 0
XP: 0
2000: I think I might have got one, but this computer was way old anyway...

 

I've had Vista for about 3 months now and never had a BSOD.

 

I'll try running Memtest86+ tonight (if I can find a blank disc lying around somewhere), but I gotta admit that I seriously doubt this is a hardware issue.
If it was one or two different errors at relatively frequent intervals perhaps, but this is - mostly - a bunch of different errors sometimes a few days apart, occasionally close to two weeks. And it's on a laptop that's turned on for around 16 hours a day and usually being used heavily for 8-10+ hours.

My money is still on one or several drivers or assorted mysterious combinations of happenings that only very occasionally notice each other and decide to spontaneously combust .
What's annoying is that it seems so difficult to track down the source(s) of the errors - at least not without hiring a professional to analyze my log files. The best I can do is search the web for some very general info on the stop codes.

I checked all my driver versions last night - with the exception of the BIOS, they all match the latest official Asus G1S drivers.
Not sure if it's worth bothering with a BIOS upgrade (never tried one of those - can't they be a bit tricky?) - nothing much besides one or two pieces of extra hardware (nothing I own) was mentioned in the update notes.

 

Yep, I have it installed too.

 

I've had my laptop for almost a year and I've had none. If I ran Windows XP I'd be needed to do format about now.

 

I have been having this problem. My Vista would crash when I open it after putting it to sleep. It doesn't happen often - may be 10 times.

I ran memtest when I got the laptop. Nothing turned up.

Let me know if you find a solution.

 

Mine does that too but only the 10 first times after a format.
For the C90S I know it is related to the memory. Dunno for the G1S

 

3 Vista machines 0 BSOD, really starting to like Vista (Goodbye XP) it's been very stable for me.

 

2 vista machines, 0 BSODs.

 

1 month old hp laptop:
I got my '1st' couple of BSODs last weekend, then followed by 2 early of this week.
All in all: 4 BSODs in this week only.
But luckily haven't got any from the past 2 days.

I hope I can get an advice from those who really had one and solved it successfully whether it is about drivers or something.

 

WE can't help you with that little amount of infos about them

 

One because I undervolted it too far, I'm now at 1 volt stable!

 

i have had 0. dv6563cl from hp, bought from costco. reinstalled vista and tweaked it a lil with 3rd party software and got a silky smooth 15 sec bootup time and zero lag whatsoever.

 

I noticed that the BSODs I've experienced appeared randomly, with no particular program or situation.
I don't remember what was actually written on the blue screen but right now I'm figuring out how to read the memory dumps in the Windows folder, to get the information i need. As of now, I'm having a hard time opening those dumps.

 

Three, and they were all related to Comodo V3. None related to Vista nor any other product.

 

None and ive been using mine for a year now.

 

My old Sony GRT 785B ran vista BASIC and it lagged like mad! Even with 1gb ram, processor was P4 2.66ghz and a nvidia geforce 420 go...probably lack of updated drivers, had BSOD twice on that laptop and so far none on my X57 Philips which ran x32 and x64 vista ultimate! its great unlike when i used XP! =p

 

I have one Sony Vaio with Vista Ultimate - none until now (5 months old).
For gaming and multimedia I have a Toshiba X200 with Vista Premium - one BSOD (6 months old).
So for me, this is a very stable OS.