Blue Screen: Physical memory dump?

I was playing World of Warcraft and when I logged off, a blue screen came up and said it was dumping physical memory...

I didn't know what to do so I just shut it off....

Was that a bad thing? How do i fix it so it won't do it again?

 

a Blue screen (or Bsod.. blue screen of death to some) tends to denote what's called a "stop" error, one which is bad enough to potentially damage your system if it continues to run, so your system stops.

what your system then does ( depending on your settings) is "dump" everything that is currently in the computers memory (its thinking space) onto a file on your harddrive. this file can then be sent to people in the know about that sort of stuff, who can then work out what went wrong ( kind of like the way Windows does when a program has a crash, it "dumps" the state of the program into a file, then sends it off for examination).

turning it off won't have any major sideeffects, the only thing is that you'll be missing this "dump" file, but otherwise it should be ok.

as far as fixing the problem.. there are alot of different things which could have caused it. on the screen it ususally says what the problem was ( or at least, what file caused the problem). alot of the problem tends to be caused by Driver faults, or sometimes just the system "hiccuping". if it hasn't happened before, continue as normal, and if it happens again, write down what it says, and let it "dump", and you'll be able to work out what went wrong.. if it doesn't happen again, well, no problem to fix

hope that helps.

 

thx that helped...

also, I checked on task manager and it said i had 2045 MB on my physical memory, but 1570 MB was cached, and only 19 MB is free...

could that be why? and how do i clear the cached memory to make more room?