If you have ever puzzled over those crash dump analysis bits of information on the Windows blue screen of death, or been surprised by a repeating reboot of your computer, often associated with start up, you might want to take a look at WhoCrashed. This software package “checks for drivers which have been crashing your computer” – sounds pretty handy.

When installing WhoCrashed, you might be asked to download the Windows Debugging Package (WinDbg) from Microsoft – WhoCrashed uses the facilities of this package to help perform its analysis (its a big download so make a cup of tea or something).

After running the program on my laptop it found four crash dumps and analysed each one, see the screen dump for an example. As you can see the last crash it believes was caused by a video driver issue, and it was right. On that day I was fiddling around trying to update the video driver on my machine. Whilst software that performs analysis of this nature can never be 100% correct it is still well worth getting a pointer in the right direction and WhoCrashed certainly seems to do the job.

The good news is that with v2.0 of WhoCrashed now available it runs on Windows 7 too. A free version is available for download for home use, and a professional edition is available for use at work. The professional version also allows crash dump analysis of remote network computers, and offers more detailed analysis.

Visit WhoCrashed.