My Dell XPS 8950 I bought primarily for SteamVR started exhibiting bug checks at around six months old. It was eventually fixed under Dell's one-year warranty, but the journey started with an attempt to diagnose it myself. Stressing it with Folding@Home would crash it once roughly every 12-24 hours.

When Windows halts with a bug check, a memory dump file is written to disk for debug purposes. It takes significant expertise to dig through a memory dump file to pinpoint a root cause. However, it's pretty easy to get a general idea of what we are dealing with. We can install Windows debugger (WinDbg) and use its built-in automated analyzer to extract a top-level error code we can then look up online. Over the course of two weeks I ran Folding@Home to build a collection of memory dump files, hoping to find commonalities that might point at a source.

The best case scenario is to have the same bug check code on every dump, occurring in the same operating system component. What I got instead is a list of thirteen codes (appended at the bottom of this post), some more often than others. And even worse, they didn't all happen at the same place in the system but was spread all around. The only vague commonality between them is an invalid memory operation. Sadly, "invalid memory operation" is too broad of a category to tie to a root cause. I became quite discouraged looking over those memory dumps.

I know Dell tech support has a database of bug check codes and a list of diagnostic steps to address each of them. First level support technicians are trained to tell the customer to try each item in turn. Figure a half dozen things they want me to try (probably starting with "please turn off and back on again"...) for each of 13 possible codes means I will have to trudge through a lot of those procedures.

Eventually my support ticket will establish a widespread pattern that escalate my case to more senior support staff who will look at the problem more holistically, but I have to earn it with persistence! I will be spending a lot of time with Dell tech support, starting with their preinstalled troubleshooting tool called SupportAssist.

Bug check codes encountered, with URL of the Microsoft reference page and the first sentence of their explanation pasted in after the code.