Debug application crash

[Rover321]

We supply some third party Windows 7 Delphi software to our customers. Recently, one particular customer site has started getting intermittent lockups/ freezes of the whole machine. All Windows event logs show is "unexpected reboot" and occasionally "PC shutdown unexpectedly at xx:xx" Apart from turning on performance monitoring counters using perfmon, is there any other logging we can do to find out what was happening at the time the machine crashed?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Uhm, a "lockup/freeze of the whole machine" is NOT an "application crash".

 

[Rover321]

ok, sorry. I've observed it lock up on my own machine and the application crashed/ malfunctioned first of all, after which free memory started slowly decreasing and the machine would have locked up completely eventually. For the machines in the field that lock up all we currently know is that when someone turns up to the machine, it's locked up / unresponsive for unknown reasons.

 

[Elixer]

All Windows event logs show is "unexpected reboot" and occasionally "PC shutdown unexpectedly at xx:xx" Apart from turning on performance monitoring counters using perfmon, is there any other logging we can do to find out what was happening at the time the machine crashed?

The "unexpected reboot" is usually a BSOD / driver bug.
The "PC shutdown unexpectedly at xx:xx" is usually because of heat issues (CPU overheating).
Of course, malware can also do this as well, so, you got some troubleshooting to do.

 

[John Connor]

Try dependency walker and process explorer and/or process hacker.

 

[Scooby Doo]

The "unexpected reboot" is usually a BSOD / driver bug.
The "PC shutdown unexpectedly at xx:xx" is usually because of heat issues (CPU overheating).
Of course, malware can also do this as well, so, you got some troubleshooting to do.

Don't forget bad memory too.... just had that happen to me. Couldn't figure out why the same dll was causing a blue screen until a memory-error blue screen occurred.