error message: physical dump of memory complete

[john]

dell laptop totally locked up when this message appeared
overnight. would not reboot. finally i removed battery and
restarted manually. what is this?

 

[R. McCarty]

When an "Exception" occurs, the system dumps the contents
of memory to a debugging file *.dmp. Developers can examine
this data to determine what event happened and the contents of
system registers. An exception is a software instruction that the
computer cannot recover from. Kind of like the PC going down
a dead-end street. Most exceptions will trigger a Blue Screen of
Death These are "Handlers" that intercept the faults and display
system register data on the screen. The causes are infinite, and
can be driver related, bad software or simply memory access
violations. There is only cause for concern if this starts happening
on a frequent basis.