From time to time I've seen posts about folks getting Windows' BSOD [Blue Screen crashes], but -- & I really hope this doesn't sound arrogant -- it's been so long since we've had any here that we'd forgotten what a PITA those can be. In case it helps then, maybe just as a reminder?...
Nirsoft.net has a small app, BlueScreenView, that reads the dump files Windows creates, giving you a human-readable view of what might have happened. Going to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced you can reach a dialog where you control Windows startup behavior, & can set Windows to Not automatically re-start when it crashes, so you can actually read what happened on the Blue Screen rather than sometimes just seeing a brief flash of blue. Either way Google, a LOT -- I mean don't just read the first page of hits, but maybe 3 or 4 or more, as from my recent experience anyway it took that much to get a sort of consensus of what had happened... it was very far from cut & dry. Also use your head -- while none of the errors were identical, in this case they all had to do with paging errors, i.e. writing between memory & hard drive, which meant checking the memory & hard drive were great places to start.
In this case what happened is 1 of the RAM sticks failed, [almost?] completely. On the way to diagnosing that came across 2 problems that I wanted to pass along... The 1st is that [I think} because of the severity of the failure, win7's built-in memory checker utility crashed both times I ran it. That's not a huge deal except finding out it had crashed was a slight hassle -- had to go through the error logs, Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer. That memory checker *Should* re-start the system, run just after boot, then show you a pop-up with the results as soon as you log into win7, but it apparently doesn't show that pop-up fairly often, so again you have to go through the logs. In this case I had to go through the logs once to find there weren't any results, then again to find out the app crashed.
The 2nd problem *Hopefully* won't occur for anyone, but it took quite a few Google pages to find it so here it is in case. As far as memory checking apps goes, Memtest86 is Very popular, but in my case running the bootable CD I kept getting interrupt errors -- it can be caused by problems reading the media, & using the version of the app that installs to a USB stick worked fine. BTW, running memtest86 it tests the RAM sticks one by one, & watching the memory range you can tell which stick is bad, e.g. in this case the 3rd 2 GBs of RAM -- I was able to pop all the sticks out, put just that stick in the 1st slot, boot to memtest86 & confirm. Also BTW, while bios with hot key boot menus are popular [e.g. hit Escape during boot], not all of them will list USB sticks, & in those cases you'll have to dig into the bios settings [usually Del during boot]... on that particular board the USB stick was listed in the hard drive boot order.
ANd now that I've got that posted, I Really, Truly, Hope no one ever has cause to find it useful. :-)
