minidump

[howard]

I get a lot of blue screen aborts. Maybe two per day.

Usually when I reboot, Windows XP takes me to
https://oca.microsoft.com/en/secure/manualupl.asp where it has me browse to
my dump and upload it. It has instructions on how to find the dump file.
I followed those instructions and discovered that it is set to
%SystemRoot%\Minidump.

But this is a directory with loads of minidumps. I can tell by the name
which is most current. (I didn't catch this at first).

How log should I keep these dumps?

Does anybody at MS look at these?

The normal aborts that get sent to MS - what happens to them? They are way
more common than these minidump aborts.

 

[John Barnett - MVP]

If you keep all the minidumps your hard drive will soon fill up so the
easiest thing to do is delete them. Once a minidump is uploaded to Microsoft
it is usually looked at but, other than the minidump, no other information
is uploaded - I.e., email details etc therefore Microsoft would not be able
to contact you. Having said that, to contact everyone each time a minidump
was uploaded would tie up Microsoft support and, basically, nothing would
get done. To be effective problems have to be prioritised, so if your
problem was the only one then it could be just a glitch of your machine but
say one hundred people (my fictitious figure only) had the same problem then
it would be necessary to try to reproduce the problem and, if a reproduction
could be made, maybe issue a patch to cure the problem. Crashes etc are
irritating but remember, as well as windows xp, you also have hardware to
add to the equation. In other words not every crash can be attributed to xp.

 

[S.Sengupta]

Hi,
see:-
Reading the Small Memory Dump Files That Windows Can Create for Debugging
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q315263
you can eaily delete them.
regards,
ssg MS-MVP
pronetworks.org