Deciphering Vista Crash Dump Reports

Your computer is going to crash. It is inevitable that, at time or another, something will cause your computer to dramatically shift from its current state and crash.  In earlier versions of Windows, including Windows XP, this resulted in the blue screen of death (BSOD), and has become somewhat of an icon within the geekier crowd.  “To err is to be human” is just as memorable as the BSOD, though it is unlikely that anyone outside of the highly tech savvy crowd will understand what it means.

A crash dump can be a useful tool for debugging why your system just crashed, giving you insights on the overall condition of your computer, the performance, the stability of your current configuration, and software issues that may be arising.  If you new to a computer, much of this will probably be over your head in terms of technical ability and troubleshooting requirements.  At time, even we find this frustrating, and we were born to compute.

About the “Crash Dump”

Right before the system hangs, Vista will dump the entire contents of the currently accessible memory into a series of .dmp files. Your RAM will be dumped, and it may take up around 2 gigabytes of space on your hard drive; the operating system will be dumped, resulting in a 400+ megabyte file; various other smaller dumps may also be made, and they will take up varying amount of hard drive space depending on how significant the program that they were dumped from was.

Assessing the Crash Dump

When your computer hangs it is best to give it time to generate the crash dump, giving you some kind of point of reference in which to analyze and determine the cause of the crash from.  You can specify the way Vista will handle crash dumps in the System Properties --> Advanced --> Startup and Recovery tab.

The main file that you will want to look for is the system kernel dump, memory.dmp.  This file will of significant size- anywhere above and beyond 350 megabytes.  This is also the primary file that Microsoft may want to use for their Online Crash Assessment tool, and it contains the most worthwhile information (such as dates, times, open programs, etc.).

If you are unsure, it may be best to leave all .dmp files in place, burn them to a DVD, and keep them on record in the event that your customer support network requires it, or if you simply want to debug it later on down the road.

We hope that this article has given you a better understanding of Crash Dumps, and how you can find the various .dmp files associated with one.  Good luck!