Boom. Blue screen, and the system freezes. In its eternal wisdom (!), Windows vomits a message that only a Martian could interpret... but the Web is on our side, allowing us to download free tools like BlueScreenView, another magnificent piece developed by NirSoft. Its job is to detect all the "minidumps" that the operating system generates when a blue screen occurs, and present basic information about it, including a visual reproduction.
When Windows decides that a computer's situation is critical and presents a Blue Screen of Death to prevent information loss (which usually happens anyway), one of the most irritating aspects (not to mention the crash itself) is that it triggers an automatic restart. The question is: how can we understand the content of the blue screen if it remains on our monitors for less than a second?
While Microsoft offers an option that disables the automatic restart, what they consider ideal in Redmond is that we work with the so-called "minidumps", logs that store detailed information about the cause of the blue screen, the modules involved, the specific error type, and of course elements like date and time.
How to View the Blue Screen Minidumps
One of the best ways to see those minidumps is the BlueScreenView application from NirSoft. All you need is to download a copy, install it (or unzip to a temporary folder if it's the portable version), run it with administrator privileges, and go through each of the entries stored in the "Minidump" folder.
BlueScreenView has the ability to reproduce the blue screen at the bottom of its interface exactly as we saw it at the time of the error, but it's also possible to view the raw data, or request a list of the involved files. As if that weren't enough, BlueScreenView supports reading minidumps on remote systems, assuming we have administrative access to them.
As NirSoft has accustomed us, its BlueScreenView application is completely clean, and has not caused any alert with our antivirus. The language support is impressive (you can download the Spanish module from the official site if you wish), and builds are offered in both 32 and 64 bits.
