Troubleshooting bluescreen of death ntoskrnl.exe Windows 7

Had issues with my Windows 7 box got lots of bluescreens, but it happened mostly while I wasn’t around. I came back and saw my computer either being rebooted or hanging on the blue screen.

TLDR; scroll to bottom

Reading the memory dump

Make sure you have enabled memory dumps on system failures. Open System in All Control Panel Items (shortcut Win+Break), then open Advanced system settings in the sidebar.

Select Advanced, then Startup and Recovery -> Settings…. Enable Write debugging information” and select *Kernel memory dump.

On the next BSOD, the current system memory will be dumped into a .dmp file for debugging purposes. This will help in determining the cause of the error.

I use BlueScreenView to view the dumps afterward

All of my incidents seemed to occur within ntoskrnl.exe. A lot of articles were suggesting issues related to storage and NTFS, but it didn’t really seem like the cause for mine.

Troubleshooting

• Memory faulty?
  • Ran 13 passes of memtest86 without errors
• SATA faulty?
  • Switched SATA cables
  • Chose a different port on the motherboard
• Switch BIOS settings for on-board devices
  • Disabled COM Super I/O
  • Disconnected front USB hub (as I’ve had issues with connectivity on those ports)
  • Intel system drivers update
• Prevent OS from sleeping
  • I was seeing a pattern of when was getting blue screens; either when going to, or waking up from sleep.
  • Disabling sleep solved the problems

So preventing my OS from going to sleep solved my problems, and I don’t mind it not sleeping. It’s still turning off the monitors without issues, so I’m happy.