How to Diagnose a Windows Crash — Find Out What's Actually Wrong
Don't treat the symptoms — find the cause. Use Event Viewer and Reliability Monitor to build the timeline, Resource Monitor to catch live problems, and WinDbg to read the crash dump, then test one theory at a time.
Read the guide → TroubleshootingPC Freezing, Crashing, or Lagging in Games? Check This First
A client's Overwatch fell from roughly 240 FPS to 20–30. The old GTX 1080 Ti looked guilty, but the useful evidence was 97% RAM use and a nearly full Windows drive — here's how I narrowed it down before replacing anything.
Read the case → TroubleshootingWSL2 CreateVm/HCS/ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND: The Repair That Worked
WSL2 stopped booting after a Windows update and returned CreateVm/HCS/ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND. The Ubuntu disk was still there; repairing the installed WSL package restored it — here's the diagnostic trail, including the fixes that did not apply.
Read the breakdown → How-ToReinstalling Your Graphics Driver — A Step-by-Step Walkthrough for Non-Technical Users
Glitching, black screens, or games crashing? A full driver reinstall often fixes it. Here's the calm, no-jargon, nothing-skipped way to do it with DDU — including the one BitLocker check you must not skip.
Read the guide → TroubleshootingDaVinci Resolve nvlddmkm.sys Crash: What Fixed Mine
DaVinci Resolve was tied to repeated nvlddmkm.sys blue screens on an RTX 4070. Here's how I isolated it — and the configuration changes that stopped the crashes without an RMA.
Read the breakdown → TroubleshootingSYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION BSOD: Avast Was Leaking Kernel Memory
My Windows 11 workstation crashed with SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION every ~36 hours. The dumps blamed graphics — the real culprit was Avast leaking kernel memory, over a million un-freed allocations. Here's the full diagnostic trail, with the evidence.
Read the breakdown →When the obvious fixes don't stick
If you've tried the usual fixes and the problem keeps coming back, that's where I come in — methodical, first-hand diagnosis instead of guesswork.
$100/hour