Over the weekend, I was troubleshooting reports of a few BSoDs that were crashing a Windows XP PC. Since this was quite after the fact, I had to do some investigative work to try to find the cause so I could figure out a resolution. The memory dumps in their native form aren’t the most readable but they provide the most complete information to help track down the problem. Using BlueScreenView from NirSoft makes this process much easier.
The app includes a portable version and is great to have on your USB drive should something come up. Upon launch, it will automatically find and load the reports in the local computer but it can also be used to view reports of computers across a LAN if you have administrator access to other computers.
The utility presents the crash information in a much more readable manner than you’ll get through the System event logs and certainly notepad. Being able to quickly switch between recent crashes can help find any consistencies that might indicate that point of failure.
For added convenience, BlueScreenView is included in the previously reported Windows System Control Center with other SysInternal and NirSoft apps for a very portable solution.