Tag: blue screen of death

Blue screen troubleshooting tips for Windows

September 21, 2008 by Jason

Normally, the blue screen of death contains a driver name, and some addresses; if you’re lucky, removing that driver will do the trick. But what if there is no driver name on the BSoD? And what if you don’t have all the skills to play with crashdumps and debuggers?

In this case, Autoruns comes to the rescue. This is a graphical tool that allows you to disable/enable drivers in a very easy way.

The strategy:

1. Boot into safe mode (since the system is crashing when you attempt to boot normally);
2. Start Autoruns, and switch to the Drivers tab;
3. Go through the list, and uncheck the drivers that are suspicious;
4. Close the program, restart and boot normally

The steps above will be repeated until the system is able to boot correctly.

When that happens, remember what were the last changes you applied, and try to enable some drivers back – until you figure out which one of them was causing the issue. Read More»

Leopard Flies Off the Shelf, But Glitches Reported

November 01, 2007 by Jason

The long awaited and much anticipated launch of the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system, codenamed Leopard, has resulted in the usual round of craziness from Apple’s adoring fans. Early adopters camped outside stores to be first in the queue, and what a queue it was! Early estimates suggest that around 9 percent of OS X users upgraded to Leopard in the first couple of days of it going on sale, and at $129 a pop that’s a welcome boost to the Apple coffers.

There’s been a fair amount of excitement surrounding the launch but the claimed 300 ‘New’ features have been widely dismissed as hype, and one or two commentators have pointed out that a couple of them bear an uncanny resemblance to features in Windows Vista, which Leopard is clearly designed to challenge. Read More»