Causes of hard crashes on Windows XP and how to debug

Posted by Sam Brightman on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Sam Brightman
Published on 2010-02-24T13:58:45Z Indexed on 2010/03/27 1:03 UTC
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I am occasionally seeing hard lockups on XP: totally unresponsive to keyboard/mouse, screen freezes at time of crash, no SSH/VNC possible. Very intermittent, nothing in the logs. I never see a blue screen on any kind of error message.

This morning I logged in via VNC, logged out again, 20 minutes later physically sat at PC and it crashed around the time of VNC logout.

I tend to suspect video cards in these kind of situations but it's a modern-ish card with modern drivers (one revision back, but this has been happening for 5 revisions or more) and normally would at least see a blue screen I expect.

What would you suspect? Where can I look or what can I set up for more information? Bear in mind that this happens about once every 3 or 4 weeks, so extensive logging or intrusive monitoring isn't really an option.

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