Anonymous

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Anonymous

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April 16th, 2022 21:00

XPS 8930, system stability, black screen crashes, live kernel errors

Need help on the best approach to finding the cause of the problem once and for good. This has been going on over 50 days. 

Two components have been replaced. Every effort troubleshooting and testing have reached a dead end.

After it shipped back with the last component replaced, I disabled the PCL express link state in the advanced settings under power management options. Hibernation had already been disabled

Then ran system file checker from a command. After Windows resource protection repaired system files, I immediately launched reliability monitor. Every live kernel error that I just viewed  5 minutes earlier that were reported as far back as I could view had disappeared. Gone. No, I didn't clear / delete the history, or in Event Viewer, or do a clean install of windows. 

Installed WhoCrashed, configured for a crash dump file, shut down for next day

The following day, a black screen, apps crashing, with 4 live kernel errors. 

From mere observation, the app triggering the crash was Firefox. All windows apps already open also crashed...File Explorer, Control Panel, and I think Settings.

My proverbial no nonsense approach to Windows 10's pagefile is to allow Windows to manage the size. It's currently 1024 MB which is 1 GB binary I believe. I've got 16 GB Ram.  

On windows, the page file is used for crash dumps. For kernel memory dumps, the page file I think must be at least 800 MB on systems with 8 GB Ram or more. 

So when WhoCrashed said a kernel memory dump requires the page file to be at least the RAM size, I configured a live kernel report and minidump anyway. Unfortunately, no dump file was written after the recent crash. I dont buy the nonsense to set your PF manually. 

I'm not even getting a minidump crash file in windows configured to write a minidump. 

I need something, some clue, to know whats going on.... a kernel crash dump file would offer some info

The hardware service agreement has expired. That was a hard lesson I have to live with. 

I have three add-ons in Firefox - multi- account container, uBlock, and badger. Made changes in configuration editor from default settings, but those add-ons and changes in about:config were made two or maybe three years ago. I never had this  problem until after I updated the BIOS to 1.1.20, I believe, in February of this year.

Some helpful direction would really go a long way and be appreciated beyond any expression of my gratitude. It's groundhog day every day. I think I'm at my wits end.