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How do you 'capture' a BSOD?
nosh:
D-oh! Thanks.
f0dder:
read something on TweakGuides about Windows absolutely needing one, irrespective of mem size
-nosh (December 16, 2007, 07:42 AM)
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Not really true, you can disable it completely on WinXP (and probably later versions as well, meaning win2003 and Vista) and things will run just fine - if you disable paging file on win2k and earlier, the system will generate a minimal paging file and throw a warning on boot, though.
Obviously you'll run into trouble if you exhaust physical memory, and the system might not be able to save crash dump information without a pagefile, but I've been running without for sevaral years on xp32 and now xp64, with 1gig of memory in the beginning and 2gig for quite a while. With 1gig I had problems every now and then with some games, but haven't had any problems since I upgraded to 2gig.
J-Mac:
Nosh - I also run two monitors: a 21" Viewsonic as primary and a 19" WS Viewsonic as seconday. I used UltraMon for a while and loved it but several odd conflicts and many crashes later I finally gave up on it. I discovered that it can have some issues with upscale nVidia cards - particularly if you try to use the nVidia Desktop Manager software that you usually install with your card.
The UltraMon developer - at least the guy who replies for UltraMon on their forum - told me about the nVidia Desktop Manager conflicts but he insisted that there should be no other conflicts with nVidia cards. Yet I have "run into" several folks online who have expereinced similar issues when using UltraMon with nVidia cards. Which is a shame because UM does add plenty to dual monitor setups.
Jim
vegas:
I recently faced some hardware issues with my dual monitor setup. Anytime I ran a graphics intensive program the display would get garbled before completely freezing, forcing me to hit the power button. On one of these occasions when I waited a little longer to reset the PC, a BSOD flashed very briefly and the PC complete froze again with a garbled display. I tried to emulate this a few times with a camera in my hand (feeling like a complete idiot, as you may have guessed) and having absolutely no luck. The problem was finally sorted out but maybe I could have solved the matter a lot earlier if I could have viewed the BSOD. Are these pretty babies recorded somewhere (I looked for error.log or similarly named files to no avail) or is there some other way of getting this info?
-nosh (December 16, 2007, 02:17 AM)
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I had a laptop that did this for someone a couple years ago, i pulled out my camera and let it capture video till it BSOD'd. It was just a fraction of a second, but when I looked at the video frame by frame, there was the entire BSOD message. Good luck.
Ralf Maximus:
The UltraMon developer - at least the guy who replies for UltraMon on their forum - told me about the nVidia Desktop Manager conflicts but he insisted that there should be no other conflicts with nVidia cards. Yet I have "run into" several folks online who have expereinced similar issues when using UltraMon with nVidia cards. Which is a shame because UM does add plenty to dual monitor setups.
-J-Mac (December 16, 2007, 11:08 AM)
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I'm an UltraMon user with an expensive (though older) nVidia card. In fact, mine's a weird one: Quadro NVS-440. With nVidia's Desktop Management turned off my system's rock solid.
It wasn't always that way -- when I first installed UM things got pretty unstable. It took awhile to discover the conflict between DM and UM, and that disabling nVidia's "enhancements" fixed the problem.
FWIW, there's a new beta of UltraMon 3.0 available on their website. It now relies on GDI+ and has multiple fixes for 64-bit platforms and Vista. Might be worth checking it out, as UM is indeed a superior management system for multiple monitors.
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