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I've been having trouble with my Dell Inspiron 1420. I've just reinstalled Vista and have been going through all of the updates. There is one point however where my laptop has 90 something updates to install. I'm fairly certain one of these updates is responsible for my laptop not booting and I have to run a system restore to BEFORE I do the update to get it to work. How can I tell which update is the problem?

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By "does not boot" do you mean it spends a long time at an "installing updates" screen or it truly does not boot, black screen and all? I have had a couple of times where the installing updates section took >30 minutes... – Mokubai Jun 9 '11 at 17:56
By "not boot", I means that it gets halfway done with the windows loading screen, then I get a BSOD, then it restarts and tries again – JPC Jun 9 '11 at 18:14
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You can see the event viewer, for the period, at eventvwr.exe That might contain an error code/explanation of why your system did not boot.

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I've never used the eventviewer. Any tips on what part to look under? – JPC Jun 9 '11 at 18:17
goto run-> type in eventvwr.exe – anirudh4444 Jun 9 '11 at 18:18
I know how to get to it, I meant, once I'm looking at it – JPC Jun 9 '11 at 18:36
Oh... Once you are in it, search Administrative events for the time frame. You could even see the reliability monitor if you are not sure of the time frame. Look for critical events in red – anirudh4444 Jun 9 '11 at 18:39
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Try looking at the c:\memory.dmp file generated during the BSOD using Windbg to determine what's crashing. If there's no memory.dmp file, make sure you enable a memory dump before installing the updates by following the instructions on this page.

I don't think system restore would delete memory.dmp, so you can probably do this after running system restore, or you can try running windbg from safe mode or copy the memory file to another computer (press F12 a bunch of times while the computer is booting before the Windows logo comes up).

Here's the official Microsoft instructions on how to debug a memory dump. Essentially, you'll need to install WinDbg, run it with administrator settings, set the Symbol Search Path under the File menu to "SRV*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols", and then use the Open Crash Dump option under the File menu to open memory.dmp. Once it loads, run "!analyze -v" to get more info on what caused the BSOD (it takes a few minutes - wait until it no longer says * BUSY * at the bottom.)

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Once you do that, you can try googling the process that crashed the computer. If it's a driver for a device, you can avoid installing the update for that particular driver.

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The error message was "Stop:0x0000007b(0x81e03ba0,0xc0000034,0x00000000,0 x00000000)". A quick google search didn't provide any help. – JPC Jun 12 '11 at 0:11
So we're not looking for the Stop code, I'm actually hoping you can give the MODULE_NAME, IMAGE_NAME, or PROCESS_NAME from running WinDbg !analyze -v. I'll try attaching an image to my original answer. – kispiox Jun 13 '11 at 1:02
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