Category Archives: Service Pack 3

Troubleshoot a Blue Screen of Death BSOD or Crash Dump on a Microsoft Windows Operating System

It’s probably the thing we all dread most, evereything has been working great for weeks/months/years and then suddenly your machine starts randomly crashing to a Blue Screen of Death or BSOD

All is not lost though as Windows will often generate its own crash dump a report of what happened to cause the crash, this is often invaluable when it comes to finding the cause and fixing it.

A company called Nirsoft offer a great little utility called Blue Screen View, you can download it from here ttp://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

This program will automatically analyse the default Mini Dump and Crash Dump locations and then pull back a summary of the driver or system file that was most likley the cause of your crash.  In many cases it’s then just a simple case of removing the offending software, updating/downgrading the device driver or installing a software patch/hotfix.

CPU Usage may increase to 100% while you are scrolling through a Web page in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 9

CPU Usage may increase to 100% while you are scrolling through a Web page in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 9

This can occur if the “Use smooth scrolling” option is enabled in “Internet Options” by default the “Use smooth scrolling” setting is enabled in Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9.

To resolve the issue you just need to disable/untick the “Use smooth scrolling” option in Internet Explorer by following the steps below

  1. On the “Tools” menu in Internet Explorer, click “Internet Options” then click the “Advanced” tab
  2. Click to untick the “Use smooth scrolling” check box as shown in the screenshot below

The Microsoft knowledge base article KB 885355 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885355

Apple release iTunes 10.5.3

iTunes 10.5.3 has recently been released and allows you to sync interactive iBooks textbooks to your iPad. These Multi-Touch textbooks are available for purchase from the iTunes Store on your Mac or from the iBookstore included with iBooks 2 on your iPad.

You can download it from the Apple iTunes Site http://www.apple.com/itunes/

ATI / AMD Catalyst 12.1a Preview Driver Released

ATI / AMD have released the Catalyst 12.1a preview driver, you can obtain the new driver from here:

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Catalyst121apreviewdriver.aspx

Release Notes from ATI/AMD are as follows:

The AMD Catalyst™ 12.1a Preview driver includes all of the features found in AMD Catalyst™ 12.1 Preview

Additional changes for upcoming update of Rage

  • Resolves some new texture corruption issues introduced by the latest version of the game
  • Improved performance ~5%
  • Smoother game play and reduces multicore sync points
  • Fixed mapbuffer failures when switching maps on 32-bit systems
  • Fixed a game crash when switching maps back and forth on 32 and 64bit systems

Happy Gaming 🙂