Seriously thoughtful Share BSOD/ANY SOD stories...

[Not_A_Crook]

I mentioned in my introduction thread that I had two computers down, one is a DELL desktop, and a DELL laptop from '06 or whatever...

The first incident discovery with my DELL desktop:

I'm a heavy user of computers, and typically I run into updates every two weeks or something. Except now I think I should have paid attention to updates a bit more carefully....

Anyway, one morning I woke up to check my email, it was the first thing on my mind for some confound reason. I walk over to the monitor, turn on, and find four windows I didn't ever actually open prompting me about system updates, followed with one that should have rebooted the computer, then installed... I was getting really concerned.

My concerns were not put at rest when it, all of the sudden, asked me to change the graphics properties in order to improve the performance. Without a second thought....

I cold-deactivated the $600 DELL...

I turned it back on immediately afterwards to check for any serious damage. THe thing is though, I could check the **** issue recorded if the machine would let me see whats going on!.

After messing with the SMART error display I was able to find the stop error header.

INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE

Great, just great, the update killed what I think to be was a boot-logger command...

My lesson here, never see system updates the same way ever.

My mothers laptop.... Oh boy I did NOT learn my lesson!:

Anyway my mother used an entirely old laptop with a sub-par version of XP along with an older processor.... Ok so to the problem. I thought I had eradicated the virus via Mcafee (spelled right?) system protector, yet I had these symptoms of future troubles that would eventually lead me to a "faceless" BSOD.

- Data Execution Program would half-way shut down my desktop and interrupt about 14 of the programs already on there. Even without operation.

- Can't use C:/PROMPT to run Chkdsk, because apparently the Volume was intruded.

- The laptop experienced a ghost installation attempt not triggered by me, which lead to a temporary IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error. Luckilly a restart took care of it.

When I thought it'd end, the laptop complained that a particular system update could not be installed.

A prompt showing me the tainted update, gotten my hard-headed self to accept the update anyway. What do I get?

The black menu of death.

I tried to start back normally, but BSOD happened then!

This "faceless" error: ***STOP: 0x0000007E

I looked this one up weeks ago, it's one of the worst system exceptions you could get, a driver would'nt even partition so safemode is out of the question.
Being grilled later in the afternoon, I spent another four hours checking the symptom tree for driver crashes.

Learn from a teen's mistake, do not trust updates too much!