Crash and BC codes, need help

[Falcon1]

Hi,

I had a suspicious and repetitive crash on my laptop when I started it today. I got the error crash notification from windows and it kept coming back each time I clicked on "ok" so I had to reboot. It seems to be working fine now but I still would like to understand what it was.

Was it just a little problem that got fixed by rebooting?
Was it something from a hacker?
was it a virus?
a serious hardware problem?

I'm including the .dmp file in attachment

Thanks in advance

 

[Route44]

Your error is 0x000000EA: THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER
A device driver problem has caused the system to pause indefinitely (hang). Typically, this is caused by a display driver waiting for the video hardware to enter an idle state. This might indicate a hardware problem with the video adapter, or a faulty video driver.


Sure enough the video driver ati2dvag.dll was cited as the cause of your issues. So...

1. Download Driver Cleaner Pro or Driver Sweeper (both have free versions; make sure the version will work with your OS) to your desktop screen and install.

2. Download the latest diver(s) for your video card but don't install them.

3. Uninstall your video card drivers and reboot your PC into Safe Mode. Run Driver Cleaner Pro or Driver Sweeper but ONLY for the video card drivers. I had someone use it on their chipset drivers! If it doesn't find any video card drivers that is quite okay.

4. Reboot and install new video card drivers.


*** Also we note you are still running XP with Service Pack 2. In 10 more days XP SP2 will no longer be supported. That's July 10th. You should update to Service Pack 3. Security Updates will extend to 2014.

 

[Falcon1]

Thanks for all the info
What can I use to extract the info from the .dmp files?

As for SP3, I was told by many that it's not that good and to avoid it as much as possible. What's your feeling about SP3?

 

[Route44]

As for SP3, I was told by many that it's not that good and to avoid it as much as possible. What's your feeling about SP3?

Well, that may have been true -- two or more years ago, but ask them what they are going to do come July 10th?

Many of us here at TechSpot run XP with SP3 without issue. I run it on my main rig, secondary rig, and my seven year old laptop without any problems.


* To read the minidump files Microsoft has made a special tool called Windebugger. It is free. Make sure you installl the latest version along with the Symbol packages.