Tom's Hardware > Forum > Windows XP > Windows XP General Discussion > Determining Cause of Random BSOD

Determining Cause of Random BSOD

Forum Windows XP : Windows XP General Discussion - Determining Cause of Random BSOD

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Greetings all,
I am having a problem for which the solution is elusive. I will attempt to spell it out as simply and clearly as possible.

The Problem

Random, though infrequent, blue screens of death. In this case they strike me unawares whether I’m playing games, surfing the net, or in iTunes. The blue screen that appears lasts for about a half-second before my monitor blanks out and the computer reboots. Because of this, I cannot determine what – specifically – is on the blue screen in order to research this error further.

Research & First Steps

Has been admittedly meager. I’m having a hard time finding relevant guidance. However, the following link contains information which I used to take my first step:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] lue-screen

Using the information on that page, I ran the verifier. Here, at least, I found a place to start, because I have been able to consistently obtain a blue screen. I will borrow the wording from that link above in order to explain what I did:

I hit Windows Key + R
I typed in verifier and hit enter
I made sure that Create Standard Setting is selected and hit next
I clicked on Select all drivers installed on this computer and hit Finish
I rebooted

Results

The reboot does what it does – starts to load windows – during which the blue screen appears again, reboots and continues the cycle of rebooting mid-boot-process. Of course, I hit F8 during the initial boot-sequence and opt to load Windows in Safe Mode with Networking. This prohibits the verifier from continuing the reboot-cascade.

After that, I opened up verifier again and changed the settings so as to constrain the drivers that are verified. In this case, I opted to Select driver names from a list and opted to select all non-Microsoft drivers. This resulted in the reboot-cascade as normal.

Final Thoughts

Should I basically go through and select individual drivers in this manner to determine which attempted verification of the driver is crashing it? It’s my next step, of course, but there are so many drivers total (not so many non-Microsoft, though) that it’s going to take a bit of time.

Thanks in advance for any guidance you PC gurus can offer.

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