Problem: The user reported that she was getting repetitive system crashes, but couldn't tell me exactly what was going on at the time of the problems. She had a recoverable BSOD at one point but didn't capture any of the debugging information. The problem record had the words "Fatal System Error" and 3 Hex strings, and that's about it.
Solution: I searched the internet for any clues related to the Hex strings. Nothing there.
I then wanted to eliminate any hardware issues, so I downloaded the diagnostic utility from Dell, created the floppies and ran the diags. You guessed it; no hardware problems. I then launched every application I could find and saved test files, trying to produce ANY kind of problem. No luck. After an hour of fruitless searching the user finally admitted that Adobe Photo Delux had been added to the machine recently. She had evaluated it and decided not to use it, and asked me to remove it. This I gladly did. I then stood by for awhile and watched her try to reproduce the error she had been seeing, without success.
There's no guarantee that Adobe Photo Delux was causing the problems but I would almost bet it was. It was the only thing that had changed, and so far we haven't seen the problems again since it was removed.
Anyhow, sometimes we forget to ask the most fundamental question when it comes to solving almost any computer problem: "What changed? "
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