Mistery solved? BSOD caused by ntoskrnl?

My brand new computer crashed 6 times already. You know, the infamous "blue screen of death" (BSOD) and after some detective work I found the culprit (?): C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe, the operating system kernel, OS version 6.1.7600.16539 (win7_gdr.100226-1909). Now, go figure why in the world the OS kernel of a Windows 7 64-bit OS is in the system32 folder (?!) First, I downloaded and installed the Microsoft 64-bit debugging tools (see 3 posts below) but the debugger "was not using the correct symbols", installed, reinstalled, did not work, and I kind of gave up. Then I found a utility called WhoCrashed, which did not work in my Win 7 machine, but it did work fine in my Vista machine (using a copy of the c:\windows\minidump files) and I got my first hint of the ntoskrnl.exe module as the culprit for my 6 episodes of STOP errors: 3 as UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP and 3 as APC_INDEX_MISMATCH. This utility also informed me that my system configuration might be incorrect, being possible that another driver is involved but it was not identified at the time of the analysis. For the UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP error I found in "Upgrading and Repairing Microsoft Windows 2nd. ed, by Scott Mueller" that the most common cause for this type of STOP error is defective memory (uncheck), L2 processor cache (uncheck) or video card memory (not sure, since I had 'updated' my NVidia driver, or perhaps precisely because of that) and "it could also be caused by an overheating system", which makes sense in my case, since I had to call DELL and get a new AC adapter, given the fact that it was getting extremely hot as an iron (!). Another great utility to read dump files, which I found along the way, is Bluescreenview by nirsoft.net (I don't make a link here because ZoneAlarm Extreme Security advised me that this site carries spyware). However I trusted the site and donwloaded the application, which being easier to use than the two I mentioned above, just confirmed what I already knew. In the meantime I was able to download and install the fabulous VMWare Workstation for virtual machines and ran Windows XP and OpenSuse, concurrently with the host OS Windows 7, without a hiccup.

End of the free ride, which was really worth it!

I guess the days of Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) are coming to an end. If you see something like this, or if your computer shuts down every two hours...

Say what?! ##Id_ String2.6844F930_ 1628_4223_ B5CC_5BB94B879762##

This is simply a service of Apple Computer's Bonjour technology, which is installed together with Adobe CS3 with an incorrect (known) name or label (the title of this post). Please note that the characters are strung together from ## to ##. This fact helps me confirm my suspicion that the culprit of my blue screen (times 3, see previous post) was caused by the unfinished and long installation process of Adobe CS3 in lethal conjunction (?) with a local connection to a Netgear "Fast Ethernet Switch" which was, by the way, invisible to Windows 7, but still with solid LED green 100-megabit lights on (!). Currently, while I write this, my DELL laptop is running flawlessly, as it is supposed to be. The Adobe page which addresses this issue of an incorrect service name states that Bonjour connects to no other servers than your machine's pre-configured DNS server. Bonjour also sends network packets to and receives them from a multicast IP address on the local network (244.0.0.251) once every thirty minutes. Voilà!? I will post my findings...

New PC and running into some disappointments

Finally, I got my new laptop, a DELL Latitude E6510, a sleek, elegant machine, with great graphics, very smooth and silent operation, with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, etc. However, I got already my first blue screen episode in the form of a APC-INDEX-MISMATCH, something that never occurred to me with Windows Vista, but I figure, and I don't want to point fingers to Microsoft, this is definitely a third party problem, including perhaps, but only perhaps, Dell misconfiguration (?). Blue screens, as far as I know are always related to hardware problems (in the form of bad device drivers) or to software that causes hardware malfunctioning. The screen reads on top: "A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer" and that's what it is, on the surface. To dig in a little bit more into the cause of the problem a small memory dump file is created in C:\Windows\Minidump, which can be reviewed using 64-bit debugging tools, found in the Windows Hardware Developer Central (WHDC). I ran into this information while trying to know more about the "dumpchk" utility to see the content of the minidump file (with an extension .dmp). I will continue exploring, while I fix, this issue. For the time being the culprits are Adobe CS3 Web Premium installation utility which triggered the blue screen 3 times (!) and maybe together with System Mechanic, which I already uninstalled. I am speculating right now.