Daily Archives: January 10, 2025

• Diagnosing an issue

  Posted on January 10, 2025 at 06:00 CST by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  I have an older HP Z2 Mini G9 workstation desktop PC running Windows 11 23H2 that lately has been driving me batty. It will randomly stop responding. The only way to get it working is to pull the power cord and turn it back on again. Ran diagnostics on all the hardware and it comes out clean. Ran Nirsoft Blue screen of death tool and it found two dump files on the box that pointed to video card drivers. There is a multi-card Nvidia installed. The way you know this is by running the Nirsoft tool and it if there is an obvious BSOD left behind, it will diagnose it and point you in the right direction. I say “point” because it gives you where the bugcheck occurred and you have to google the file name to see what or who made the driver. I downloaded the latest and greatest and now we wait to see if it occurs again. It’s one of my “older” units of my Windows 11 fleet. So, it’s not that old, but it is older.

  So why did this machine suddenly start doing this when it was fine for so many years? Software is not a finished product. Every month on any platform we get little bits of updated code that fix this, or enhance that. Especially with firmware and video drivers, often this code more than any other interacts with the additional kernel protections that Microsoft keeps adding along the way.  So when suddenly a machine starts misbehaving, do your due diligence and start running tests. Then go on to tools like Nirsoft and see if there is a bluescreen dump left behind.

  Now I will wait to see if that keeps it from freezing up again. I’ve seen this before. A well-behaved machine suddenly stops being so. And the ones with random errors are the hardest to diagnose.

  Windows 11 Patch Lady Posts