Sunday, April 13, 2008

Vista BSOD: Leave it to Alvis...

It has now been almost a full year since Lavie brought home our cherished Vista notebook.

The wisest choice I've made with it is to do a RAM upgrade from 1GB to the full 2GB the system will support.  Night-n-Day!

We have come to happy terms with UAC.

I even managed to get Vista SP1 on the silly thing a few weeks ago.

Not once, in all that time, have I ever seen a BSOD on the Vista laptop.  Ever.

I might get a BSOD once a quarter on our XP Home systems, but usually I instigate it by mucking up a device and driver.

So the other night, I was amazed to see the very first BSOD on our Vista system.

Alvis has been feeling a bit sick and has claimed our bed as her own, thus to be found under the covers, with juice or hot tea on the bedstands, piles of teen-glamour magazines on the floor, and the laptop on her lap.

It was time to forcibly remove her from her nest and toss her in her bed for the night.

I asked her to shut down the laptop and she informed me it was applying updates and said that the screen said not to turn it off until completed (good girl...she reads).

Then she closed the lid.

I opened it back up to bring it out of slumber-mode so it could complete them, unfortunately, when it popped back up, it BSOD'ed.

Apparently, placing your Vista system in a hibernation mode, in the middle of patch application, isn't a recommended Microsoft practice.  Make a note.

I had to do a hard-power reset.  It came up and fussed about not being shut down properly.

It then rebooted and went back into a "stage 0 of 3" message display about patching.  That lasted another minute then it came up to the usual login.

A check of the updates showed they all (as far as I can tell) were successfully applied after-all.

The system is up and running fine.

Leave it to Alvis.....

--Claus

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