Crash analysis - How to identify driver conflict with XP ? ? ? ?? ? ?

[Michael Bryan]

FRIENDS ........


My Toshiba Satellite XP laptop with SP2 always crashes when awakening from
"sleep" or "standby" mode, making these power saving convenience modes
useless - - - as you always have to reboot. So you might as well just
shut down the computer all the time.

Microsoft's interactive error reporting system always tells me the crash is
caused by a driver. There's the rub. Which driver ?


Do you know of any logging or crash analysis tool which might pinpoint
exactly WHICH driver is implicated ? Any tool for systematically listing
all device drivers installed on a system ? Then I could turn them off one
at a time until I found the offender.

As far as I can tell, all my TOSHIBA-SUPPLIED drivers in such critical
areas as screen and power management etc are up to date.

any ideas from experienced windows user ? Please copy my mailbox in any
reply. Thanks.


--- END MESSAGE FROM:

Mike Bryan, (e-mail address removed)

STITTSVILLE, Ontario - CANADA -
K2S 1E5

 

[CS]

On Sat, 13 Nov 2004 07:37:05 -0500, Michael Bryan <[email protected]>
wrote:

Hi Michael:

What does your Event Viewer log say? Copy the message to the
clipboard and paste to your reply. Perhaps someone will be able to
help you understand which driver it's referring to.

In my experience with Toshiba (I have a Toshiba notebook) their
drivers for XP are usually up to date and signed. What you might try
is to take a look at hardware devices in "device manager". Select
each one in turn and open properties. Remove the check next to the
comment about power saving mode. In other words, do not let the
system put the device in power save mode. You can do this for each
one until you find which device may be causing the problem.

Troublesome devices can be PCMCIA or BUS cards that are plugged in.
For example, a wireless BUS card. Make sure all those types of
devices are removed. Also any USB devices.

Lastly, Toshiba has a 24 hour toll free tech support number that you
can call. I will admit that they are not much help, but since the
call is on them, it may be worth a try.

 

[David Candy]

Where's the error message. The driver's address is included in some error codes.

 

[Michael Bryan]

There's no specific error message anywhere that I can see. All Microsoft's
great crash analysis website can tell me - - after I send a highly technical
(I can't decipher it) error report to it - is that a driver caused the
crash. Problem is, I have dozens and dozens of drivers aboard and I have
not installed anything new recently except Service Pack 2 !

 

[Michael Bryan]

Instead of physically removing and/or erasing devices and drivers, can't I
just temporarily disable the drivers with a software command in the device
manager ?

 

[David Candy]

The message will be in the event logs. You may want to ask Help to show the message on crash else if windows can't start you'll never find the error message. Type
error restart
in help.

 

[CS]

I didn't say to physically remove any driver. I only suggested that
you should stop the drivers in turn from using power management. That
"might" help you to isolate which one is problematic. The only things
to be physically removed should be any external USB , PCMCIA, and BUS
devices that you may have hooked up to the machine.