I have a three new computers I built myself in preparation for Vista. All have Asus Motherboards and AMD 64bit dual core processors all have quality memory installed (everything is Vista certified). My primary computer uses Vista ultimate and the other two have Home Premium installed. All the computers have had repeated problems where I can be working and I click on a link to run a program and the spinning blue cursor appears. No applications will run after that but I can get into Task Manager. Unfortunately I get no useful information from Task Manager, the machine hangs and will not restart in most cases unless I press the Reset button and force the issue. Sysem event logs tell me one thing about these incidents, that being that I shut down the computer improperly, no system fault is recorded for the hangup. I also have the problem with the nVidia network driver causing a system shutdown and restart while the computer is in sleep mode. I know that the last one is caused by nVidia's faulty driver so I don't need to troubleshoot it more.
Any way, cutting to the chase, I downloaded and installed WinDebug to see if it would give me a clue to what is going on during some of these failures. I then discovered that there was no dump file being generated for the failures I am concerned about. I did find that I have several dump files on the computer that were generated by other failures. These .dmp files are located in two places in the Windows directory. It appears that kernel dumps are in the Minidump folder and dumps generated by other failures are in a folder named C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\CrashDumps. In this latter folder I have two dumps both apparenty created after a service host failure.
When I run WinDmp's "!Analyze -v" command on the files in the Windows\Minidump folder I get a full report on the analysis of the fault. But, when I attempt to do the same thing with the dump files created by the service host failure I get about 3 messages telling me I don't have the needed symbols installed for this analysis to work.
All I know is that the symbols path is set up correctly and points to the Microsoft URL as it should and my network cable connection is good.
Can anyone suggest what might be causing any of this? I hope I posted this in the right place if not, will someone please correct me.
This is my first post because I just discovered Tech Spot through my subscription to Brian Livingston's Windows Secrets newsletter. As much as I use Google to search for technical solutions I can't believe it has taken years to come up with this great site's presence. I'm really impressed with the posts I have read.
Cecil Britton
Any way, cutting to the chase, I downloaded and installed WinDebug to see if it would give me a clue to what is going on during some of these failures. I then discovered that there was no dump file being generated for the failures I am concerned about. I did find that I have several dump files on the computer that were generated by other failures. These .dmp files are located in two places in the Windows directory. It appears that kernel dumps are in the Minidump folder and dumps generated by other failures are in a folder named C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\CrashDumps. In this latter folder I have two dumps both apparenty created after a service host failure.
When I run WinDmp's "!Analyze -v" command on the files in the Windows\Minidump folder I get a full report on the analysis of the fault. But, when I attempt to do the same thing with the dump files created by the service host failure I get about 3 messages telling me I don't have the needed symbols installed for this analysis to work.
All I know is that the symbols path is set up correctly and points to the Microsoft URL as it should and my network cable connection is good.
Can anyone suggest what might be causing any of this? I hope I posted this in the right place if not, will someone please correct me.
This is my first post because I just discovered Tech Spot through my subscription to Brian Livingston's Windows Secrets newsletter. As much as I use Google to search for technical solutions I can't believe it has taken years to come up with this great site's presence. I'm really impressed with the posts I have read.
Cecil Britton
