Any advice on what to do when getting a cryptic blue screen in windows?

Solution 1:

Firstly, ensure that minidumps are being taken.

1. Click Start
2. Click Run (only if using XP, otherwise you can type straight into the Vista/7 search box)
3. Type wmic recoveros set DebugInfoType = 3 and click OK. This does the same as going into System Properties and enabling the Small Memory Dump option there. Use whichever method you prefer.

There is free software called BlueScreenView which then allows you to delve into the minidump files and get an idea of exactly what files might have caused the blue screen to happen. I.e. whether it was a graphics driver, a sound driver, a program or whatever.

If you want to manually analyse the crash dump files using Microsoft's debugging tools, you will still need to follow the steps at the top to enable minidumps.

Solution 2:

You should definitely write down the hexadecimal stop code, it can often provide clues as to what actually went wrong. Googling it often produces a bunch of other people with the same problem and sometimes even fixes, though that is far less common. Usually you find out that the error can be caused by a multitude of things.