Unable to diagnose Windows 7 lockup
- by Delyan
Basic info:
Laptop Dell Studio XPS 13 (Intel P9600, 4GB RAM, NVidia 9400M card, 256G Samsung PM800 SSD)
Windows 7 Ultimate, as well as Fedora 14
Here's the deal - Windows would just lock up out of nowhere, no log entries, no dumps, no BSOD, it just freezes. This happens mostly when idle (but it happened when I was using it too) and does not follow a concrete time frame. No input is accepted - only solution is to hold the power button.
Although this sounds like a clean cut hardware issue, the reason I'm willing to rule this out is that my primary OS is Fedora 14. It's been working fine for the past 2 years and I've been stress testing the hardware (intentionally or not) every once in a while with no issues.
I would like to ask if there's any way to get a diagnostic output from Windows in a situation such as this. The next step in my testing is to leave it in Safe Mode overnight and see if it locks up but even if I do that, I still need to figure out what component freezes it up during normal operation.
