Diagnosing a Blue Screen of Death Error in Windows : For many years now the famous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) has been the ultimate indication that something disastrous has happened to make your computer die, but how useful is the information in the BSoD and the respective crash dump file that Windows produces? The best article I ever found explaining the BSoD in depth is here on the Microsoft website, however it’s quite technical and doesn’t discuss how to actually troubleshoot a problem. The crash dump file is just technical details of what was being held in the computer’s memory at the time of the crash, and this will include details on every driver and service that was loaded, and every piece of software that was running. The most useful pieces of information are to be found on the BSoD itself and are highlighted on the screenshot below. These are the BSoD error name, the stop error code and the name of the driver or service that has failed (this last one might not always appea
The Best Windows Software of 2011 : This is the third part of the Ghacks best of 2011 series. In this top list, I’m going to look at the best software for the Microsoft Windows operating system that we have reviewed in 2011 here at Ghacks. We posted a total of 937 Windows related stories in 2011, of which the majority were software related. It took quite some time to go through that list to pick the applications that should be included in the best of list. Keep in mind that this is a personal selection. Please leave a comment if you think a program is missing from the list. Close The Door – Displays the list of open TCP and UDP ports, useful to harden the system by closing ports that do not need to be open. Connectivity Fixer – Attempts to repair the Internet connection automatically. Desk Duster – Program that hides desktop icons automatically after a set period of time. Elpis Pandora Desktop Client – A free desktop player for the popular Pandora Internet radio. (Alternative for no