HOW TO: Solve blue screens of death and freeze problems with Windows 7

So participating in the TechNet forums as well as my own forum there seems to be a significant amount of people having problems with Windows 7 going blue screening and freezing on them. Here is a list of troubleshooting:

• Faulty memory module. Blue screens if not caused by software are likely to be caused by bad memory. It is not unusual that a machine works perfect with Windows XP and then starts behaving badly when upgraded to Windows 7 due to changes in memory management. Use built in Windows Memory Diagnostics (on your Windows 7 machines press F8 before Windows starts to load and choose “Windows Memory Diagnostics”) to troubleshoot the memory modules.
• Driver. Bad drivers are without doubt the most common cause for blue screens. Therefore update your drivers either by going to Windows Update or the hardware manufacturer’s web site. If no Windows 7 driver exists for the hardware go with the Windows Vista driver as good as all Vista drivers work with Windows 7.
• BIOS. When having problems with hardware in any way and particularly blue screens I would strongly recommend a BIOS upgrade as that many times improve stability and compatibility. Also resetting the BIOS settings to the default is always a good idea.
• Bad hard drive. Bad hard drives are sometimes causing blue screens. I recommend using Hitachi’s Drive Fitness Test, which can scan any brand of hard drives for errors. This tool can be found at http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Remember that you can always find out the reason for the blue screen by analyzing the memory dump file which is generated when the system crashes. Read the guide for analyzing the dump files yourself.

GUIDE: Troubleshooting and analyzing blue screens of death

HOW TO: Troubleshoot slow logons

One fairly common problem with Windows client is slow logons and this kind of problem is one of the most difficult to troubleshoot. Microsoft recently posted a two part guide on how to troubleshoot slow logons. Some really good reading!

Read more: So you have a slow logon…? (Part 1) (Part2)

When to troubleshoot blue screen crashes

The other day I got an email from a blog reader which contained the information of a successful analyze of a memory dump file which is generated when an infamous blue screen of death occur. The reader wanted me to give him the solution or point him in the direction of a solution. This got me into thinking. When is it worth putting time on doing blue screen analyzes?

The content of the crash dump is maybe not that relevant after all. What is more important is how often and when the blue screen of death occurs. If the crash occurred just once or very seldom and randomly I would say that it might not be worth finding out exactly what caused the crash. Keep in mind that a blue screen could indicate a hardware failure, although driver problems are the most common cause for crashes.

However if the crashes occur often or at when doing specific tasks you have all the reasons in the world to get to the bottom of the problem. In these cases I recommend following the guide for troubleshooting blue screen crashes.

An interesting thing to note about blue screens that start occurring after for instance upgrading the OS from Windows XP to Windows Vista or Windows 7 is that the new memory management in the later operating systems might reveal problems in the memory modules that did not show when using Windows XP.

Finally, whenever having problem with blue screens of death I would recommend upgrading the machine BIOS. Often there are compatibility and stability fixes which solves problems with hardware which might be causing you the problems you are experiencing.

General quick fix for Windows Update problems

Most problems with Windows Update can be solved by the simply renaming the folder SoftwareDistribution from the Windows directory. To be able to do so you are required to stop the service Automatic Updates (if you’re on Windows XP or Server 2003 or earlier) or the Windows Update service if you are on Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 and later.

The SoftwareDistribution folder is automatically recreated when you start the service again. Bear in mind that you will lose the update history when performing this trick, something you can get back of course if you change the name of the SoftwareDistribution folder instead of just deleting it.

Also keep in mind that deleting the SoftwareDistribution folder is for fixing problems with searching for updates or contacting a WSUS server for instance, you will not solve problems installing various hotfixes or updates using this method. To troubleshoot problems related to Windows Update or Automatic Updates look in the WindowsUpdate.log located in the root of thew Windows directory for clues. For problametic hotfix installations see the hotfix log file.

Hyper-V gadget for Windows Vista and Windows 7

If you are using Hyper-V there is no way you won’t be using the Hyper-V gadget that is available and has been available for a long time for Windows Vista and now also Windows 7. The gadget lists all your virtual machines  and easily let you start, stop, shut down or save the virtual machines.

Download the Hyper-V gadget

Create your own federated search providers in Windows 7

In Windows 7 you can create and add your own federated search providers for use in Windows Explorer. A while ago I published a step-by-step guide on how you can build federated search for a SharePoint site or for your favorite web site. The article is available in its full (in Swedish) at tipsomvista.se.

Help improve app compatibility in Windows 7

Microsoft is working more active than ever to improve application compatibility in Windows 7. Recently two Swedes announced Microsoft’s willingness to help improve application compatibility in general but also for non-English applications.

First Jesper Holmberg, working with localization at Microsoft in Redmond, announced the face that Microsoft actively wants applications in non-English languages to test with Windows 7. Second Danwei Tran, a new IT evangelist at Microsoft Sweden, offered everybody to send emails to a specific address to report compatibility issues with applications. Microsoft will then contact the developers to see how they can resolve the problems, to everybody’s benefit.

These two actions will of course make compatibility for Windows 7 superb, but never to forget, compatibility for Windows Vista will improve as well as a direct result of these actions.

Just a final note, Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 got released yesterday, more about this later on.

Solution to have multiple SSL sites on port 443 in IIS

Today I faced a problem where I had to put different sites in IIS on the same SSL port which by default is 443. As you might know you cannot set more than one web site to use port 443 in the GUI of IIS Manager, and you can neither specify different host headers there. However you can put more than one web site on the SSL port by using the command line script as stated below. Run it from C:\inetpub\adminscripts but before you do, find out what the identifier for the site you want to enable SSL for is by clicking on “Web sites” in IIS Manager.

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set /w3svc/1/SecureBindings
":443:intranet.contoso.com"

Make sure that the above command is put and run on one line and you are done. Please note that if you do not have a wildcard certificate installed (*.contoso.com) you will receive certificate warnings for one of the sites, as the certificate name will not match the host name.

Troubleshoot and analyze Blue Screens of Death

TechRepublic has written a post on how to Extract troubleshooting info from Windows XP BSOD error messages. This is good, but I must say that extracting even more information from the memory crash dump file is even better. If you’ve missed my guide on how to do this you have it right here:

Troubleshoot and analyze Blue Screens of Death