BSOD ON W7HOME 64-BIt EVERYDAY and what it does to the OS?

my laptop usage is fairly routine and i had almost no BSOD since W2K came

out many years ago.

but M18x with 7970M CF changed all that.


everytime i play certain game that requires disabling CF, I get BSOD.

everytime i think i won't be getting BSOD for certain, I get BSOD. it's basically a daily occurrence.


But i almost never get hard-crash BSOD in which the computer freezes and become

unresponsive. rather, it goes like this: the screen freezes for a few seconds, then I get

BSOD with some kind of memory dumping action,

and then reboots itself with the message that the windows recovered itself from some kind

of fatal error.
.

now, i more or less gave up on fixing this issue. you kinda have to live with it if you have AMD CF setup.

the good side is that once i successfully launch a game, tomb raider, for example, and if it doesn't crash

in the first few minutes, it's rock stable and i can play for hours at a time. it is definitely not an hardware

issue.


my question is, what exactly does BSOD do? this "memory dumping action", is it some kind of

protected rebooting process so that it won't mess up the rest of the operating system?

or does every instance of BSOD incur a bit of instability to the OS that would have to be eventually wiped and

clean-installed again?


i'm asking this because i currently have 256gb SSD as the main drive on my CF setup(M18xR2 with 7970M CF)

so i cannot install to many games on it anyways. but i'm thinking about getting myself the new Crucial 960GB

SSD for it. it's big enough to install all the games i have on Steam and Origin and some more.

but with the unavoidable BSOD, i wonder if it's worth filling that much space if the BSOD requires me to clean-install

the OS and games every month. I will definitely not do that.


In the past few months, I kept limited number of games (3-4 major ones) on my 256GB SSD and I regularly clean-installed

the windows so the health of the OS due to the BSOD was a non-issue. with the prospective of getting a bigger drive and

keeping OS for as long as it's stable, this BSOD issue has suddenly become a real concern.


any input is appreciated. thanks!

 

Exactly. When you select "Shut Down" from the start menu, Windows unloads everything from RAM and then the system powers down. That's more or less what is happening during a memory dump to avoid corruption of OS files, except the system restarts instead of shutting off.

 

thanks for your response. so even with repeated BSOD memory dumps, the integrity of the OS is not affected?

I'm asking because when I had earlier Catalysts 13.2 beta on my system, I got repeated BSODs with the above behaviors

and the whole Windows system eventually became corrupted so I had to clean-install the OS.

(although I haven't had that severe breakdown of the OS since 13.3 betas...)

 

download Resplendence Software - WhoCrashed, automatic crash dump analyzer and run it and then post the dump reports on here. with that info members might be able to give you a solution to the problem.

 

Your OS should be fine since the system is taking the same precaution during a memory dump from a BSOD as it does during normal shutdown. Any corruption won't be a direct result of the BSODs themselves, but the software causing them.