It actually works!

Yes, it works! And boy what a great time for it finally work.

I'm speaking of the little window that shows up after your computer may mysteriously lock up, or shut down, get a bsod, etc. In the past, it has popped up on me for some trivial things, and I would see if or what anything happened when I clicked to send off the info to MS for possible solutions. Nothing ever came back.

Well, the past couple of days on my home computer, a pretty awesome machine up until then, has been agonizing with bsod after bsod. It all started when I downloaded ventrilo... which is a current suspect.

Right after I downloaded ventrilo, I got some ad that popped up saying to download some stupid program because my computer had been infected. Now, I just built the system not very long ago, it's very robust, and I have Vista 64-bit on it. It's pretty much chewed through anything I can throw at it. I call it, DABEAST. Sort of like, the beast, because it is one powerful mofo.

Very soon after that, the problems started. Crash. Freeze. Memory dump. BSOD. I was like, "Damn ventrilo." Still am. So, I figure it's just some some malware/adware messing with me. I download Adaware and Superantispyware or whatever it's called, and run them. I defrag, all sorts of the usual things one does to clean out whatever crap you may have picked up. Well, things get worse.

The next day I notice that I'm mainly crashing while playing a game (WoW, just started playing a few weeks ago). So, from prior experience I know that's usually driver related. So I go and update, uninstall, reinstall, the driver more than once, because I kept crashing. While I'm crashing, and rebooting, that Windows message comes up afterwards and notifies me that Windows didn't shut down properly and that it will look for solutions. Yeah right, I've seen that thing for years and never seen anything come to fruition.

I then do a system restore, yeah, getting desperate. I go back to a point days before I downloaded ventrilo and all this crashing started. And... yep, after going through all that I still get the BSOD. If I didn't already shave my head, I'd be pulling my hair out at this point. I figure it must be something with the recent patch that WoW did. So I uninstall it and then reinstall it. Nope, still BSOD.

Then yesterday I get home, and am thinking more and more about reformatting the HD. Yep, erase it ALL and start anew. I turn on the computer, it starts up, and... what's that? A window appears saying that solutions have been found for my problem. Hmm... so I click on the window, or bubble or whatever it was, and a window pops up saying that it was determined that I am missing two (2!) microchip drivers, and a bad video driver. It provides me with options to fix it along with links to download the current driver for the ones that are missing. WOW!!!

And to top it off, it worked! AMAZING! The drivers weren't the latest, but the thing showed me what the problem was. I installed the linked drivers in a hurry (anticipating bsod at any moment) and then checked to see if there was anything newer afterward. There was, but that's no biggie. And then... nothing! Sweet sweet nothing, no BSOD whatsoever. I was on the computer for the rest of the night with not one BSOD.

THANK YOU MS! I had thought that program to be useless, but it really works!

One thing I learned as I was trying to figure out the culprit, is that Firefox does not have a 64-bit version. Well, it sorta does if you build it, but it won't run Flash or something like that. So, there's sort of a version, but not really. However, IE does have a 64 bit version, which I "discovered" already in my computer. So, I'm going back to IE on my home computer. I'll stick with FF on 32 bit systems though.

So... what uninstalled my two drivers? I don't know for sure, but this all started right after installing ventrilo. Ventrilo is used by many gamers, so it's a prime target for hackers. However, when I looked into the warning/ad that popped up right after downloading ventrilo, that appears to be a Firefox phenomenon. I'll definitely need to reinstall ventrilo at some point, but I'll probably try to have some kind a real-time protection that can detect something deleting drivers beforehand.

One thing I don't have, but will soon, is an antivirus... ugh, I know. I'm told that Avast or Antivir are a couple of good free choices to choose from. And besides superantispyware, one should also get Malwarebytes Anti Malware. Of course, I'll need to see if those work ok on a 64-bit system. Superantispyware seems ok, but I didn't really look into it when I DLed it since I was already crashing so much.

Yay for a working supercomputer again! Yes, I have a supercomputer, ASRock supercomputer mobo... check it out. Well, that mobo, an i7 920 that I'll be OCing again, 6 gigs of Corsair GT RAM (awesome, 1866), an ati HD 4870 x2, V8 air cooling, cooler master case (forget the name but it has 4 fan slots on one side and one on top), a velociraptor 10k rpm HDD, an Asus 24" monitor, 1000w Corsair PSU, and Vista 64 bit ultimate, soon to be upraded to Win7 64 bit ultimate. Much more powerful than what was called a supercomputer back in the day, at least when all its drivers are installed.