Blue screen, system dump, is everything fine now?

When your computer appears to power up okay, but operating system won't start properly, your operating system got corrupted somehow. Most of the boot up of problem because of registry missing or crashed, file deleted or changed. You might have been worrying about losing your data. I had the same experience. Fortunately, a friend of mine who is a IT professional told me that Tenorshare Data Recovery WinPE was available to help with data recovery under any os boot up problems. And I had managed to retrieve my files from my crashed laptop with it. And you can get it from any-data-recovery.com I ended up reinstall Windows. Anyway,I fixed it myself without bringing it to computer repair shop which cost a lot and without losing any data. BTW, there are some tutorials to guide you fix black screen of death on the website, you can check it out.

"Now my computer seems to be working fine. What should I do? How do I know it's fine?" Okay, first of all DON'T WORRY! The BSOD could certainly be a once off and may not recur, Windows can and does perform regular maintenance of your PC and most of this is done seamlessly in the background and is usually unobtrusive. Occasionally there may be a temporary glitch that Windows cannot gracefully recover from and so will force a system stop (BSOD) and restart to clear the "glitch" and refresh everything and all is normal again with no harm done. "1) How do I find out what was wrong (how do I access the system dump files..or whatever they're called)." The dump files may not be terribly useful to you, unless you have knowledge in programming and/or software development and support- the dump files are for the benefit of Microsoft's support technicians and other software developers for diagnostic and troubleshooting purposes. You may find the Event Viewer more helpful to you, it's located- Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Administrative Tools Open Event Viewer and then go to "System" in the explorer side panel You can google the event ID codes etc for more info, there is plenty of information about this on the web. "2) How do I make sure my computer's ok... 4) How do I prevent it from happening again?" If you don't get that BSOD again then chances are your PC is perfectly fine and you don't need to do anything at all. Taking good care of your computer- keeping the fan vents free of dust and obstruction. try not to move your laptop around too much whilst it is running- the hard drive has moving parts that can "skip" and cause an error if it is jerked around excessively, this can lead to a BSOD. Keep your hardware drivers up to date, you can find these in the support/drivers/downloads section on your laptop manufacturer's website, outdated drivers are a common cause of BSODs. Make sure you have automatic updates enabled for Vista, it is important to keep Windows up to date also keep your antivirus and other installed programs up to date. This kind of maintenance will keep your PC running well. Your laptop has been running for 3 years without problems, that's pretty damn good! Well done, so you must be doing something right ;-) Consider purchasing an external hard drive and backing up your files on it, if ever something goes badly wrong with your laptop or you decide to get a new PC you will at least have a good backup of all your stuff. If you get another BSOD note down the STOP error code (eg- ***STOP 0x0000008E...) the error description (eg- KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED) and the name of the file or process involved if this is provided (eg- nv4_disp.dll) these details are very usefull and you can Google this info to find out more about what may have caused the error and ways to fix it. Again, don't worry, BSODs aren't always indicative of catastrophe and even if reoccurring, many are easily fixable really.