Tracking down a blue screen cause

I'm on an Asus G51VX-X3A running Windows 7 Home Premium. Recently I had video issues that led me to reinstalling Windows. The G51 comes with an OS and Driver CD. I had lost the driver CD, so after I installed the OS, I got everything off Asus, and everything was pretty. I got rid of all the unknown devices in device manager. Now, a few weeks into it, I'm getting random blue screens.

One happened while watching videos in Firefox. Another happened in the middle of Starcraft 2. Another happened this morning during a class while we were working on an assignment on a website.

The information on the screen flashes too fast to see what it is. Is the blue screen logged somewhere so we can try to track down the culprit?

 

Have you looked at the Event Viewer?There must be a log with the blue screen occurances.

 

You can also try the Reliability Monitor to check if it's logged down. Just type it on the Start Orb Search Bar and find out the culprit.

Otherwise if the BSOD flashes too quickly and restart then you can do this. Right-click on Computer then click Properties. On the left bar choose "Advanced System Settings" then on Startup & Recovery click "Settings". Under System Failure uncheck "Automatically Restart". This is so when the BSOD appear again it will hang on the screen instead of restarting so you can take note of the failing driver. You will need to hard reset once you acquire this information.

 

You can try using WhoCrashed to figure it out. At the least, minidumps are usually enabled by default in Win7, so you can backtrack to the cause. WhoCrashed has a somewhat easier interface than other error code viewers, without oversimplifying the output.

 

Nirsoft has a BlueScreenView/minidump reader that does a very good job.

of course, you have to have your machine configured to actually generate the crash files. If you've disabled this, you're kind of stuck. No diag info, no crash diagnosis possible.

Read this:

How to configure Windows to create MiniDump files on BSOD

 

WhoCrashed requires proper WinDbg and proper config to work right, so it's not novice level for sure, but I like the output better than BlueScreenView. BlueScreenView listed everything that was loaded/running, but made isolating single issues down to a certain device or driver a bit of a pain. You could at least get the why but never the what.

 

Oh, it was set to a kernel dump. I changed it to small memory dump. I'll wait for it to happen again then.

 

best thing i found to use is Who Crashed

run it now and it should still give you the last bsod and run it after all bsod to see if its the same error.

 

Bluescreenview is good. You can also install the latest Windows debugging tools, which includes WinDbg, to get more information about the memory/ kernel dumps.

 

The only thing I can do now is wait for it to happen again. I haven't seen it in a week.

 

run who crashed,that will show the last bsod even if it hasnt happened for a few days.

 

I said in a few posts earlier that minidumping wasn't enabled. It is now and I'm just waiting for a BSOD to happen again.

Okay. WhoCrashed said dumps are enabled but found no minidumps. I've had 3-4 crashes in the last half hour. No dumps. What's going on? So, I went in system settings and turned off the auto restart. The only difference between now and even over the weekend when I used my computer all weekend was I was at home connected to my 24" HDTV monitor. Right now, I'm at my college sitting at a table in the cafeteria. Even have less devices hooked up because when I'm at home I have a keyboard, mouse, monitor and usb hub that also connects to my phone. What gives? We'll wait more and see.

I attached a picture of the BSOD from my phone. I can't get it to dump to a file. This is pissing me off. I swear I have nearly full stability at home. I'm wondering if it's related to the video card/monitor.

 

In the meantime, have you made sure that your machine bios is up to date, all of your device drivers are up to date, the os (windows update) patches are up to date, etc, etc....

 

It's possible you have the NVIDIA driver bug. Basically, I found that some of the video drivers posted on the ASUS website don't like 4GB of ram. I had this problem with my ASUS G1S. I ended up getting the latest driver directly from NVIDIA. Try that.

 

Downloading the latest NVIDIA driver. Going to try that. Just sucks when a powerful machine like this gets rendered useless. ><

 

Been running this the last few days. I thought the problem was related to using my laptop at school. The difference between work and school is that at home, the laptop is hooked up to a 24" monitor. I got BSODs every few minutes at school, and none at home. This correlates with the NVIDIA driver issue with the RAM that metril suggested.

I tried using the laptop at school, and I flashed the rom on my phone, browsed the net, listened to music, and played starcraft 2 without a crash. Looks like I'm on the road to a fix or at the fix now. I'll keep playtesting it.

 

The memory dump logs are enabled and I'm not seeing minidumps in the Windows folder after BSODs. I have my laptop unplugged and not plugged in an external monitor, and I just had a BSOD while just browsing the internet. I installed those NVIDIA drivers, and I had no BSODs one day using my laptop plugged into external power and no monitor for a few hours. Now, I'm just not sure the drivers fixed the issue. Any ideas?

 

Been 2 weeks since I posted, looking for some advice. I found a website online that sells restore cd's for systems. I found the one for G51VX and ordered the Windows 7 one. It just got here and I came to find out that several of the drivers are incompatible. I ended up having to get online with my phone, download the wifi drivers and use windows update to stabilize the system. I think the CD was for 32-bit. Sigh!

However, I still have the problem of blue screens. I seem only get them when I'm at school, connected to the network there, and not to an external monitor. The thing is, I use my laptop freely daily without the external monitor at home and I get no blue screens.

BSOD minidumps are on, but no logs are showing up in the windows/minidump directory. Why? I'm going to try messing around with the laptop at home away from school and not connected with the external monitor to see if I can reproduce it at home. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

Are you always plugged at home and on battery at school???Your problem is very weird.Why don't you do a clean install with win7 from this forum?If you find what the problem is please post it.Very weird.

 

This is weird. I did a clean install, used a few drivers from the disc I got, but the majority from asus or windows update. I'm sitting at school for a half hour now, and no BSOD. I wonder if it was a bad installation?