After 24 crashes in 6 days it looked as if Old Bessie, my computer, running WinXP(Home)SP2, was heading for the last roundup, along with my bank balance. My primitive analyses of the minidumps indicated hardware failures and memory corruptions galore, and Net searches suggested the same. But every test I was aware of had been run, and had come up clean.
In desperation, I saved my current Documents and Settings, restored a few weeks old disk image and my current Documents and Settings, and used verifier.exe (it's in system32).One tweak was also made to Services: Remote Procedure Call was set to 'manual' but, looking at dependencies, it appears that very many other services are reliant upon it, so it was switched to automatic.
Day 3, without a glitch. Old Bessie lives! It would be nice to know which of the above steps solved the problem, but I'll settle for what I've got.
Before using verifier, look it up on the Net, and *don't* set it to verify *all* drivers. I did, initially, and it took 50 minutes to get from boot to Desktop and 6, after pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, for Task Manager to appear. But it's a tool I shall be using every time a new programme is installed, to verify unsigned drivers. Make sure that you know how to turn it off if you don't want it running constantly in the background.
The moral, of course, is that minidumps can be useful tools - if the faults on several dumps are consistent ( I imagine that a constantly repeated Exception Code would be key, but I'm new to this so what do I know?)- but, while their facts are correct, their conclusions are not gospel.
In desperation, I saved my current Documents and Settings, restored a few weeks old disk image and my current Documents and Settings, and used verifier.exe (it's in system32).One tweak was also made to Services: Remote Procedure Call was set to 'manual' but, looking at dependencies, it appears that very many other services are reliant upon it, so it was switched to automatic.
Day 3, without a glitch. Old Bessie lives! It would be nice to know which of the above steps solved the problem, but I'll settle for what I've got.
Before using verifier, look it up on the Net, and *don't* set it to verify *all* drivers. I did, initially, and it took 50 minutes to get from boot to Desktop and 6, after pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, for Task Manager to appear. But it's a tool I shall be using every time a new programme is installed, to verify unsigned drivers. Make sure that you know how to turn it off if you don't want it running constantly in the background.
The moral, of course, is that minidumps can be useful tools - if the faults on several dumps are consistent ( I imagine that a constantly repeated Exception Code would be key, but I'm new to this so what do I know?)- but, while their facts are correct, their conclusions are not gospel.
