I just experienced the blue screen of death for my new windows XP service SP2 PC... Have excel running and MetaStock QuoteCenter... and that's it... hardly any CPU use at all.. maybe 12 to 18% at the most... 4GB of memory... Its been running flawlessly for a month or so since installation... best memory, hard drive, MB, etc... i could buy and install... Does anyone know of a software program i could run on windows all time from boot that could track WHY a blue screen happens... Is it possible to track this somehow... thanks...
No need to either wait till "next time" or look for a third-party program yet. Every Windows XP system comes with just such a software tool running, by default. It's called Event Viewer and it keeps detailed logs of all "events," both major like your BSD and minor. You can read more in this MS Knowledge Base article. The event logs may or may not answer the "why" for you, but at least they'll always give you (or others) a complete historical record of the "what" and "when"... a useful starting point.
I have repaired several blue death screens. One was a virus, other times it is hardware. Aside from the good suggestion to google error code, also try to see if you can get into bios menu to look at a few things as well.
Good note... wasn't sure if the Event Viewer would have all the info i would need about a 'blue screen' crash.. will check it out... thanks... Ok... will do - thanks... edge'