If you're experiencing Blue Screens or other unexpected reboots when Windows is running, see if there's anything logged and include that along with your correspondence to Technical Support. Blue Screens are Windows' way of protecting data from corruption and should create a crash dump that can potentially help track down the problem. BSoD's or sudden reboots can be caused by new hardware, software, corruption of system files or failed Windows updates.

1. If this is something that has suddenly happened, check for any new Windows Updates and Application Installs.

2. Many times there's an indication of the fault on the Blue Screen or unexpected error display itself. If you see the error, forward as much detail about them as part of your report.

3. Check the system for corrupt system files. At an elevated command prompt, run sfc /scannow and see if it finds and repairs anything.

4. Check if you have any minidumps in your Windows/minidump directory. If there's a MEMORY.DMP in the Windows directory, you're probably not configured for minidumps. To configure for minidumps, go to the Start Menu, Type System Properties and launch SystemPropertiesAdvanced.exe. Under Startup and Recovery/System Failure make sure Write an Event to the System Log is selected and Small Memory Dump is chosen. Now when the system Blue Screens it will dump a new minidump in Windows/minidump for every crash and we can see if there's any pattern. Forward any minidumps you find so we can take a look at them. You can zip up multiple dumps if you have many of them. If you want to analyze the logs yourself, there are a few tools you can use. Windows Debugger is the best. A couple others are BlueScreenView and WhoCrashed.

5. See if there's anything useful in the Event Logs. You can get to them via Computer Management/Event Viewer. You can export EVTX's (Save All Events As...) of the Windows Logs/Application and Windows Logs/System logs and include them with the support ticket.

6. Run msinfo32 and Save an .nfo report. This saves a dump of your system's configuration. Attach this to a response as well.

7. It may be necessary to perform a restore from a backup or our system image to determine if the problem is hardware or software related. If you have a spare drive you could swap out your OS drive and perform the restoration to the spare so that you don't overwrite your current OS.