Does an Error Appear in System Information?
Select Start, type msinfo32,
and press Enter to launch the System Information utility. In the
Hardware Resources branch, check the Conflicts/Sharing sub-branch for
device conflicts. Also, see whether the Components\Problem Devices
category lists any devices, as shown in Figure 2.
Did You Recently Edit the Registry?
Improper Registry
modifications can cause all kinds of mischief. If the problem occurred
after editing the Registry, try restoring the changed key or setting.
Ideally, if you exported a backup of the offending key, you should
import the backup.
Did You Recently Change Any Windows Settings?
If the problem started
after you changed your Windows configuration, try reversing the change.
Even something as seemingly innocent as activating a screensaver can
cause problems, so don’t rule anything out. If you’ve made a number of
recent changes and you’re not sure about everything you did, or if it
would take too long to reverse all the changes individually, use System
Restore to revert your system to the most recent checkpoint before you
made the changes.
Did Windows 7 “Spontaneously” Reboot?
When certain
errors occur, Windows 7 will reboot itself. This apparently random
behavior is actually built in to the system in the event of a system
failure (also called a stop error or a blue screen of death—BSOD). By default, Windows 7 writes an error event to the system log,
dumps the contents of memory into a file, and then reboots the system.
So, if your system reboots, check the Event Viewer to see what happened.
You can control how Windows 7 handles system failures by following these steps:
1. | Select Start, type systempropertiesadvanced, and press Enter to open the System Properties dialog box with the Advanced tab displayed.
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2. | In the Startup and Recovery group, click Settings. Figure 3 shows the Startup and Recovery dialog box that appears.
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3. | Configure how Windows 7 handles system failures using the following controls in the System Failure group:
- Write an Event to the System Log—
Leave this check box activated to have the system failure recorded in
the system log. This enables you to view the event in the Event Viewer.
- Automatically Restart—
This is the option that, when activated, causes your system to reboot
when a stop error occurs. Deactivate this check box if you want to avoid
the reboot. This is useful if an error message appears briefly before
Windows 7 reboots. By disabling the automatic restart, you give yourself
time to read and write down the error message.
Tip
If
the BSOD problem occurs during startup, your computer winds up in an
endless loop: You reboot, the problem occurs, the BSOD appears, and then
your computer reboots. Unfortunately, the BSOD appears only fleetingly,
so you never have enough time to read (much less record) the error
message. If this happens, display the Windows Boot Manager menu, press F8 to display the Advanced
Boot Options menu, and then select the Disable Automatic Restart on
System Failure item. This tells Windows 7 not to reboot after the BSOD
appears, so you can then write down the error message and, hopefully,
successfully troubleshoot the problem.
- Write Debugging Information—
This list determines what information Windows 7 saves to disk (in the
folder specified in the text box below the list) when a system failure
occurs. This information—it’s called a memory dump—contains data that can help a tech support employee determine the cause of the problem. You have four choices:
None— No debugging information is written. Small Memory Dump (128 KB)—
This option writes the minimum amount of useful information that could
be used to identify what caused the stop error. This 128KB file includes
the stop error number and its description, the list of running device
drivers, and the processor state. Kernel Memory Dump— This option writes the contents of the kernel memory to the disk. (The kernel
is the Windows 7 component that manages low-level functions for
processor-related activities such as scheduling and dispatching threads,
handling interrupts and exceptions, and synchronizing multiple
processors.) This dump includes memory allocated to the kernel, the
hardware abstraction layer, and the drivers and programs used by the
kernel. Unallocated memory and memory allocated to user programs are not
included in the dump. This information is the most useful for
troubleshooting, so I recommend using this option. Complete Memory Dump— This option writes the entire contents of RAM to the disk. Caution
Windows 7 first writes the debugging information to the paging file—Pagefile.sys in the root folder of the %SystemDrive%.
When you restart the computer, Windows 7 then transfers the information
to the dump file. Therefore, you must have a large enough paging file
to handle the memory dump. This is particularly true for the Complete
Memory Dump option, which requires the paging file to be as large as the
physical RAM, plus 1 megabyte. The file size of the Kernel Memory Dump
is typically about a third of physical RAM, although it may be as large
as 800MB. If the paging file isn’t large enough to handle the dump,
Windows 7 writes only as much information as can fit into the paging
file. - Overwrite Any Existing File—
When this option is activated, Windows 7 overwrites any existing dump
file with the new dump information. If you deactivate this check box,
Windows 7 creates a new dump file with each system failure. Note that
this option is enabled only for the Kernel Memory Dump and the Complete
Memory Dump (which by default write to the same file: %SystemRoot%\Memory.dmp).
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4. | Click OK in all the open dialog boxes to put the new settings into effect.
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