Windows 7: BSOD! - Brand New HP - HP Tech Support No Good - You Guys Rock, Thanks

I have a new HP Pavilion dm4 laptop which has randomly restarted on me and gives me the BSOD. I have spent my entire Saturday today trying to learn how to debug my PC - I'm a novice as you can tell. I spent over an hour with HP Tech Support and the best they can do was try to convince me to do a full system recovery or pay $59 to have someone smarter try to fix the issue. I was down on my luck and it's now nearing midnight and miraculously I found this great site - a place where people help other people - this is great!



I'm not sure how much info you need here, but attached are the requested files. The crash has occurred exactly 5 times. A couple times it gave me the BSOD before restarting and it also just restarted a few times without the BSOD prompting either to start-up normally or in safe mode. The times of the crashes are:

1/20/2011 12:40:06 AM
1/28/2011 8:59:38 PM
1/28/2011 9:05:03 PM
1/28/2011 9:11:03 PM
1/28/2011 9:39:23 PM

Thanks so much for your help. You have no idea how much I appreciate your help. I'm exhausted from this issue but I'll be jumping out of bed tomorrow to see what you guys find! Thank you! -Mario

System Information
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (OEM)
HP Pavilion dm4 - 1160us (band-new, less than a month)
Intel Core i5-450M @ 2.40GHz
4GB DDR3 SDRAM (2 Dimm)
500GB (7200RPM)

Your .dmp file is blaming vsdatant.sys ( Zone Alarm TrueVector Device Driver ) as the cause of your crash. Zone Alarm is notorius for causing BSOD issues in some Windows 7 systems. Uninstall Zone Alarm and replace it with Microsoft Security Essentials, and see if this clears up your problem...


These drivers are out of date and need to be updated, or the associated program uninstalled...

Thanks Tews for your analysis! Considering the data I sent, is Zone Alarm 100% the cause of the crash and did it point to it for all five crash events I experienced. I appreciate your recommendation of Microsoft Security Essentials but I do want to mention that I'm also using AVG. I was using Zone Alarm just as a firewall. I currently have AVG, Spybot Search & Destroy, Malwarebytes, and Spyware Blaster installed on my laptop and they seem to work fine together, although I think only AVG is set to give me active protection - the others I run as scans occasionally and to immunize (not sure what that is). My only concern if I uninstall Zone Alarm is not having a firewall. Am I already protected enough without Zone Alarm or should I have another firewall. Does Windows 7 already have a firewall built in? I would appreciate any input regarding adequate protection. Thanks! -Mario

Hello Mario, yes, Zone Alarm was blamed in all of your .dmp files. Windows includes a native firewall and will protect your system just fine. If you want to use a different firewall, Comodo firewall is good, and its free to boot...