OK, I totally panicked and didn't write down the error numbers or anything like that, but I got my first Vista Blue Screen of Death today and it totally freaked me out. Now that I have made sure that everything is backed up and Vista seems to be working right again, the question is what next? Is there anything I need to do to debug the system, repair the registry, anything I can do to (somewhat) prevent this from happening again, anything?

yay Vista

You should be able tot ake a look at the Event Viewer and find out what the blue screen was.

I'm so glad I kept XP! Does returning the system to a previous day's version do anything for that?

I'm having a little trouble finding it...I'm in the Event Viewer and have pinned down the range of events around the time of the BSoD but am not sure exactly what I am looking at or what to do next. There are a couple of events - ID 7036 -- that seem to stand out and are right about the time of the crash, but I don't know what the events actually are, what the programming lingo means.


Think it's too late to call Dell and tell them I want to downgrade back to XP?

Is the crashing chronic or acute? If acute, I wouldn't worry about it. Unfortunately all OS's crash. Most likely cause was a device driver. Did you get the option when you brought the machine back up to send the details off to Microsoft? They usually can give you a clue as to what driver caused the crash. Do you know if you updated any drivers (Video, audio, etc) lately?

Watson buckets are your friend... the more people that report crashes like this, the more likely fixes will come down the pipe. I've sat in the triage meetings - number of hits matters a lot. Please send this stuff on.

For those of you who are paranoid, personally identifiable information isn't contained within watson buckets.

To translate for Bm, "Watson buckets" are the crash reports that Windows offers to send.

I agree with EC that if this is a one-time thing, I wouldn't worry too much about it. If it is a recurring problem, then it is worth looking into. If you can't find it in the event viewer, don't worry about it - if it happens again write it down.

Never got a prompt to send the crash report to Windows, which I thought was odd -- on my XP system it seemed like every time Windows paused for a second they wanted to send a report to Bill Gates...

This is the first time this has happened (hence the panic - I thought I lost everything and my wife would have killed me if all the pictures of my son were lost in a crash.) As I was telling my wife, I think it's the first BSoD I've gotten on any system in several years...I don't recall getting any on my last two computers (both XP machines) and I think I have to go back to Windows 9x for the last BSoD (if my memory serves.)

Immediately preceding the crash there were problems with my wireless notebook mouse - it was acting "funny" and when I tried the wireless mouse from my wife's computer it didn't work at all - then the crash, so I assume it's related. To the best of my knowledge there were no driver updates, and no software updates over the last few days.

Blue, were you telling me about Mozy? I think I am all set to join them now, so let me know if I need to put you down as a referral. I don't think I'll be trusting just the external hard drive backup anymore...

Nope, that was Fezmid who uses Mozy. I do think he'd appreciate a referral though if you wouldn't mind PMing him.

Blue screens really aren't big deals. If you get one in XP/Vista/Server 2k3/2k8, it means Windows couldn't recover and had to shut down the system.

The vast majority of blue screens are the result of drivers not playing well with their hardware, or hardware that is actually failing. Almost all software crashes are handled without blue screens.

Will do, thanks. The thread disappeared in the Great TSW Crash of '08, and I couldn't remember who was helping me there...


I think I've heard too much of the myths and horror stories of people losing data after the BSoD and whatnot, and that's why I panicked. I was seriously worried that my system was not going to recover properly and we would lose everything.

I'm probably doubly nervous because the hard drive died on my old desktop computer about two months ago and we lost a lot of time restoring stuff from backups, re-installing and configuring programs and whatnot. I don't think we lost much in terms of actual data - documents, photos, etc - but just finding and re-downloading programs, re-registering programs, etc., was a real PITA and I was afraid this was worse.

Thanks to everyone for helping calm my nerves.

Repeat after me....

Multiple back-ups...
Multiple back-ups...
Multiple back-ups...
Multiple back-ups...
Multiple back-ups...

Thanks for weighing in, I had no idea.

Seriously, though - I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, since my previous thread about backups was ironically lost in the TSW server crash, but I usually do have stuff backed up. I realized afterwards that most of my pics would have been recoverable, since I recently burned a DVD of the majority of the photos, and the rest of the really recent ones are still on the memory cards. Most of my documents were copied onto the other laptop, but some of the recent stuff could have been lost.

A few weeks ago the hard drive on my desktop died, and I have been in the process of moving stuff to the other computers, re-downloading programs so I can open some of the files, etc., and haven't been able to set up the external hard drive to automatically back everything up yet.

I've been kind of busy with work stuff and family situations and that's why it got overlooked until yesterday, which is why I was signing up for Mozy at 12:30 in the morning last night...it's uploading the files as we speak, so I will have most of my stuff in one place.

But you're preaching to the choir about backups - this just happened at the worst possible time.

I'm sure you're right but I've got 2 machines running OSX and have never had either OS crash in 2 years of home use. The only time I reboot is when an update requires it.

My XP machine, which I use more, doesn't crash a lot--maybe once a month.

I've had servers running at work for over 1000 days straight.