Nasty bug shuts down Win7 without warning

[mortenha69 7]

Well, this is a nightmare!

After loading FSX, my laptop will do an abrupt shut down without any sort of heads up! It usually happens within 5 minutes of loading.

This is the worst! CDT would at least give me some chance to debug the system! But no! The system does a very brief and frantic harddisk I/O and then just shuts down!

Here's a brief story of my situation:

I use my Samsung RC530 laptop for simming (on a tight budget folks). It follows that the laptop isn't a dedicated gaming rig. And that I'm prone to installing all kinds of software I think I need at any given moment (probably braking some cardinal rule on system stability).  Furthermore I'm a periodical simmer, and sometimes it can take several months between each time I fire up FSX. So my memory fails me in trying to pinpoint a possible culprit that might cause this violent crash!

I'm quite certain that it isn't my FSX installation that is causing the crash. As it worked perfectly last time I fired it up 7-8 months ago. It got to be some software installed between then and now.

I have done the following:

• Used the AVSIM CTD manual and tried most of the steps, excluding disabling scenery.

• Unistalled a lot of software

• Registry cleanup (CCleaner and Wise)

• Malware search (Adaware)

• virus search (Microsoft Security Essentials)

• Stopping Processes and Services before loading FSX (Something I always do)

I consider myself an advanced user when it comes to Windows (might have to reconsider that) OS's. And at this stage, a complete reinstall is not an option. In fact, this problem has made me more tenacious than ever!

I have been battling this for days now. And I humbly ask you, my fellow simmers, to point me in the right direction. I do have a starting theory I'd like to share with you:
 
A crash of this magnitude must have a very specific cause, and in theory it should be a rare event. Win7 is a very advanced operating system, and the following is true about the inner workings. Win7 creates a virtual machine on startup and isolates HW from program execution. Disk I/O, memory I/O, and other system calls all have to be passed to the kernel for execution. And for program code  initiate/cause a crash/shutdown, bypassing the windows messaging queue (preparing to shut down windows is meticulous process) and all the barriers to halt execution of faulty code (even built in to the processor), without ANY warning! Should be rare event indeed!

The Event log contains nothing, No BSOD dump file exists!
 
As I mentioned earlier, the system does some frantic Disk I/O, lasting for about a second, before going dark. Perhaps some sort of realtime disk logging program could help me?
 
In short, is there any sort of procedure I can follow, given the severity of the crash? Hoping that only rare situations can cause this?
 
Thanks

 

Morten Haughom

[mortenha69 7]

SOLVED!!! (Or at least it looks that way)

 

The sim has been stable for an hour now, so it looks good!

 

After searching the net for solutions, I stumbled across ComboFix. It is a system repair tool (with nuclear power as one reviewer described it :lol: ) that runs from the command line. And should be used with care!!

 

I threw caution to the wind and let it have a go, and voila!! FSX seems to be happy!

 

Although I'll never know what it repaired, I really don't care now. My frustration was reaching unhealthy levels.

 

Well, before I do anything else I'll back up my OPSYS and FSX partitions.

 

Cheers!