I’m always wondering how upset the Microsoft folks must get

Most blue screens nowadays are caused by third-party drivers and a big share of these by security products that use improper hooking of system calls, such as Kaspersky did.

I’m not exactly a Microsoft fanboy, but people should really get some grips on reality. Microsoft-Bashing seems to have it’s high season again at the moment. Currently a “phantom bug” in Windows 7 RTM is making its round on the net, e.g. mentioned here. I’m not saying it’s not a bug, but it couldn’t be reproduced or confirmed by MS just yet.

Now the principle is easy and is the same for Windows 2000 through Windows 7. Configure your system to create an actual crashdump (full dumps are often preferred, but in many cases the minidumps are highly useful as well and will at least give the dev a clue as to whether or not a full dump might be needed). Once that is done, whenever you encounter a blue screen and you are able to reproduce it, there will be something to give to the devs to have a look into (memory.dmp under %SystemRoot% or [date].dmp in %SystemRoot%\Minidump). The procedure is detailed in this KB article.

It’s fascinating to see people “yelling” at Microsoft to fix something they claim is reproducable and an actual issue, but the same people don’t seem to want to be of any help to track the issue down by offering at the very least a minidump of the alleged crashes. Most such issues can easily be tracked to the source either way. No matter whether it is a third-party driver or not or whether Microsoft will work around it or work with the vendor to fix the driver, a minidump is the first thing needed to get things rolling.

// Oliver

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