Blue Screen of Death gets makeover for Windows 8 Windows 8 doesn't just put Microsoft's operating system on finger-friendly tablets, it also gives the notorious Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) a touchy makeover. Known officially as a bug check, the BSOD has been overhauled so it can take its place in an age of brevity and emoticons. The Windows 8 BSOD still features the …
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA does not mean a problem with hardware.
In fact, very few times is this the case in my experience - it's almost always drivers misbehaving.
All it means is a page fault occurred when a request was made for memory than cannot be paged out, and the page was not resident in RAM.
Replacing the hardware won't fix driver issues.
The bugcheck screen has little of use on it - the event in the event log has the STOP code and 4 parameters which gives just as much information to start troubleshooting.
I'm still amazed at how windows can still come up with "unknown" device detected and not give you any sort of clue as to what type of device it's suddenly discovered (when you haven't installed any new hardware recently) that would give you a clue as to exactly which bit of "unknown hardware" has probably just developed corrupted drivers or gone titsup - thereby enabling you to specifically re-install those drivers or order the replacement part.
I also still don't get how linux can tell you exactly what you have just slotted in (usually including the firmware version etc.) when windows quite often doesn't seem to be able to even tell you what type of device has just been inserted!?!
Of course, I still use windows as well, as I have some rather expensive software which only runs on windows :-(
"Nvidia drivers named as lead Vista crash cause in 2007"
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/03/28/nvidia_vista_drivers/
I can happily say that my current/previous laptops with the Intel crap have been BSOD free for years now. Of course they're not the powerhouses of NVidia or AMD but they do run the games of yesteryear just fine.
And Creative has disappointed me since before Windows 95 with their lack of support or working software.
I have been playing with the dev preview this morning. Initially I was having the same trouble. I was getting a DRIVER IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL stop message referencing storachi.sys
It appears that the preview at present doesn't play ball with the VirtualBox SATA controller. If you go into the settings of your created VM, Under storage remove the disk from the SATA controller and re-add it in as an IDE disk that 'may' fix your problem as it did mine.
My Windows 7 install has not shown BSODs yet, neither has my XP install on my decidedly aged laptop done so for years. Having said that, a smiley like that would not go far to improve my temper once it did happen. Seeing one in a demo of a product is perhaps not too odd, as it is probably still in beta. I will give MS the benefit of the doubt here. If the BSOD is not likely to pop up at all in the final product, I don't much care what it looks like.
"Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn't handle, and now it needs to restart. After the restart please click on the resulting link where you can not only fill out another exciting MS survey but you also pre-register for the update to Windows 9 which features an even larger frowny face icon and 15% faster Blue Screens for your convenience. "
"Microsoft. Inconveniencing you just enough to convince you to upgrade every 18 months."
At least with Microsoft the product support/lifetime is half-decent unlike Apple where you have to upgrade to the newest iToy to continue getting software updates which, when they release a phone every year-or-so, could get fairly inconvenient.
Probably a good job in that respect that the Apple fanboys are devoted enough to always buy the latest/greatest.
Mine is the one with anti-Apple propaganda in the jacket pocket...
My Tiger and Snow Leopard systems are still working fine, and there is no real need to upgrade till the hardware dies, which so far has surpassed the life time of the S*nY V**o which managed 2 years.
I can still do all the things I need to do, and for security, well a decent router with third party firmware behind another firewall , plus dpi on the outgoing traffic to sop Om*****e little tricks.
I love fanboize btw, they help fund the development of the closely knit hw/sw that Apple provides as part of the package, and therefore reliability , and I expect to migrate to Clouded Leopard next.
"...I can still do all the things I need to do..."
Thanks to the efforts done by third party developers like Mozilla foundation or Opera. Because the Gestapo... I mean Apple, wants you to upgrade to Snow or Lion to have the latest Safari. Contrary to the Windows version where you still can run the latest one on Windows XP?
Apple fucked up as soon as they started using inferior Intel cpu's in their supposedly superior systems.
...that the lack of information would reall hack off support staff that needed to know WHY Windows fell over in the first place, but then I sat and thought of all those time when, armed with loads of obscure numbers, I couldn't decypher them anyway ... so ... no change there, then.
You'd think I wouldn't get annoyed by idiots like this one -- after all, if I could somehow wave a magic wand and replace all my clients' various Windows installs with whatever happens to be the trendy flavor of Linux, my desktop support business would increase in value by a factor of ten.
To the point mentioned earlier - the lack of error message means less exposure on search engines regarding specific problems therefore centralizing specific knowledge about Windows problems. This is clearly a tactic by Microsoft to enrich their support services -- and by enrich I mean increase revenue.
Actually, Windows Error Reporting (WER) is in-box and through submissions of data relating to app and OS crashes, allows solutions to be provided to end users when they appear - so if you hit a bugcheck typical of, for example, a known nVidia graphics driver issue, you get a URL pointing you to the place you can download a stable version.
Next time you click on "opt out" for any "customer experience program", read what it says and think again ;)
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