When your computer crashes with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (”BSOD”), you can’t easily capture the necessary information without either getting writer’s cramp or being lost in a sea of technobabble. Fortunately, most of the technobabble can be ignored.
In a nutshell, here is what is considered important when writing down information about a crash. Specifically, there are three important pieces of information that we’re interested in:
Item #1 tells us what error happened.
Item #2 tells us where the error happened.
Item #3 tells us who caused the error to happen.
Oddly enough, item #3 is often ignored and forgotten; this is, perhaps, the most important piece of information on the entire page. And yes, recording all the numbers alongside each of the three items of information is very, very important.
Sometimes an error message can be misleading, and in some cases, it doesn’t help us pin down much of anything whatsoever. However, these three pieces of information increase our odds in troubleshooting what possibly went wrong in the first place. Write down these three pieces of information and send them in an e-mail to your computer support professional; this will allow them to more easily research the error.
Additional questions to ponder: What happened immediately prior to the crash? Was a particular program running or exhibiting bizarre or slow behavior? Did anything out of the ordinary, aside from the crash, happen recently? Did anything new get installed (software or hardware) on the computer recently? When was the last time your computer was serviced? Again, many of these questions can be misleading and may not help us in our quest for an answer, however they often times are more revealing than we realize.