Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

Troubleshoot Windows XP Professional. Been getting an amazing number of hangs (e.g., mouse freezes) and random reboots (no blue screen, just blown to the restart).
Feels like there is instability in at least two machines at the driver level. As an old NT guy, I know that the only way this happens is if something dies at the kernel level. That is usually a device driver. Sigh.
The worst part is that when this happens, XP is so aggressive about caching the file system, that usually files get destroyed.
In any case, I’m debugging and found a great guide to blue screen and other crashes. My favorite and the one I see most often is
bq. 0X0000000A. IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
My favorite advice is of course in “System Recovery”:http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/getstarted/backup.mspx where they tell you you need to install a Recovery Console *before* you have a crash. Not super helpful really and you need to type the DOS command:
bq. e:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons
when you’ve insert the CD. Wow, that’s friendly, but very necessary. This command console is basically a command line XP (I btw love the way the name of the setup utility is still winnt.exe since that’s what the product was originally called before it became 2000/XP/2003 etc.)