Laptop Woes

I’ve been fighting a blue screen of death on my Toshiba M400. The error is 0x0000007F 0×00000008, 0×80042000. The blue screen message indicates that this could be software, it could be hardware.
One bug check that was automatically submitted to Microsoft resulted in the suggestion that the video card was faulty.
One search suggested that it might be a Symantec Antivirus problem with kernel memory.
Another search indicates its a stack overflow in the Windows kernel mode thread.
It could really be anything. To get into the operating system, I booted to safe mode and used msconfig to disable most everything. I tried removing Symantec Antivirus and disabling Cyberarmor. Each time I was only able to get into the OS without a BSOD briefly.
I called Toshiba support in search of a diagnostics CD similar to that which Dell provides. Unfortunately Toshiba only provides the diagnostics for use within Windows. They suggest that I revert to the manufacturor image. I wasn’t too happy with that response.
Since I was unable to pin it down as a hardware or software problem, I went ahead and backed up my data before restoring to the manufacturers image (hold down zero while booting).
I’m going to wait a few reboots before applying any patches or installing any software.

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  3. Client GUIDs
  4. SANS Section 1.2 Promising Practices in Selecting Laptop Encryption
  5. Qualys Quality – or lack there of

One Comment

  1. Steve Shockley says:

    Do you still have a crashdump (c:\windows\memory.dmp)? You can open that in windbg and it’ll pinpoint which driver caused the crash, usually.

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