What to do when Windows has recovered from a fatal error

It is safe to say that most people today are dependent on their computers, whether for work or pleasure. It may not even be too much of an exaggeration to say that reliance on computers has increased exponentially in the last decade. Regardless of the numbers, due to our increasing reliance on computers, we understandably tend to get frustrated whenever failures occur, especially those that disrupt our daily computing routine. At one point or another, you may encounter an error message displayed on your screen that says something like “Windows has recovered from a fatal error,” and subsequently you may find that your computer randomly restarts after you log in. Worst of all, you may encounter the dreaded BSOD, or rather, the “blue screen of death”, with the codes:

STOP: 0x00000050 (0xF792C000, 0x00000000, 0xF77D8046, 0x00000000)

WindrvNT.sys: address F77D8046 in F77D4000, date stamp 409F405C

This problem occurs when Windows encounters a problem and creates a dump file. Because computers don’t have the ability to differentiate between various degrees of severities, sometimes even the smallest errors are considered serious, even if you haven’t done anything unusual or out of the ordinary. If it doesn’t solve the problem, it will repeat every time you reboot, because your computer would have thought that nothing was done to fix the problem.

When you encounter this problem, remember that your computer stores minidump files in the WINDOWSMINIDUMP directory, and although the information is somewhat complicated for the average computer user to decipher, you can still submit a report to the Online Crash Scanner at Windows from Microsoft. site for experts to find out what’s going on with your computer. You may need to sign in using your Microsoft.Net Passport details, so make sure you’ve already registered with Microsoft one way or another (usually if you have a Hotmail account you shouldn’t worry).

One of the possible reasons for the dreaded error message could be a faulty driver, especially in cases where the “blue screen of death” appears. If this is indeed the case, all you will have to do is reinstall the existing driver or install the latest driver for whatever device is causing the problem. Try to identify which device is causing the problem.

But for those of you who are lucky enough to be able to get your computer running without encountering the BSOD long enough to fix the problem, here are some things you can do to prevent the error from occurring in the future.

You can disable your error reporting temporarily, especially if you find the constant error message appearing somewhat annoying while you are trying to fix the problem. Do this by going to My Computer and right-clicking to bring up the Properties window, then under the Advanced tab, click on Error Reporting and check the No error reporting box. While in the Advanced Properties window, you can also disable your computer’s virtual memory by turning on the “No Page File” setting. Once you’ve done that, restart your computer and check that the page file option is set to 0 kb. To do this, simply go to Control Panel and change the view settings in Folder options to allow viewing of system files. You should be able to see pagefile.sys once you’re done, and although you’ll be warned, delete this file. You can safely do this since you already disabled virtual memory earlier, as the computer would have no use for this particular entry. Remove it completely from your system; this means deleting it even from your Recycle Bin. Now, do the complete opposite of what you have done before; Re-enable your virtual memory and error reporting with the settings that were set earlier and reboot. Your computer should now get rid of the recurring error message.

So if you’re ever unlucky enough to encounter the “Windows has recovered from a fatal error” message, now you know what steps to take, without having to panic about the interruption of your daily computing routine.