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#1
How to be ready for the inevitable BSOD
I've got years of experience with PCs, but (fortunately? unfortunately?) very little with BSODs, and I was hit with one last night on one of my W7HP PCs. I paid little attention to the BSOD itself, believing the info I needed had been captured to HDD before the crash. On reboot, I have a single file in \minidump and a memory.dmp in \windows but both of these are several weeks old--not apparently created from last nights BSOD. Also, on reboot, I did not see any message "Windows has recovered from a serious problem".
So my question is: what do I (or anybody) need to do to make sure they are prepared to respond to a BSOD? I already have in my System control panel failure settings:
"Write an event to the system log" -- checked
"Automatically restart" -- unchecked
"Write debugging information" -- Kernel memory dump
Dump file: %SystemRoot%\MEMORY.DMP
Overwrite any existing file -- unchecked
Is this right? Kernel dump vs. small dump? Is there any 3rd party utility I could be running to enhance the ability to tshoot a BSOD after?
Sorry if this has been asked 1000 times--I only looked at the one sticky here by jc & Jonathan and saw only "after" advice and not "prep for" afaict. TIA!