I've got a Gateway P7811FX that dual-boots Win7 and Vista. It was running great for over a year until a few weeks ago when I got my first-ever BSOD. As the title says, the code was 9F, which when I Googled it seems to mostly happen when changing power states (nope) or when using a Firewire hard drive (also nope).
My first suspicion was a driver issue, Win7 still being new-ish and all, and having recently updated my video card drivers, so I booted back into Vista, which I hadn't even touched in almost a month. That ran smoothly for a day or so, but recently it also bluescreened, same STOP 9F error.
I'm starting to get worried -- it's still covered by a BB extended warranty, so if I can prove there's a hardware problem I should be able to get it fixed/replaced in short order, but nothing seems to actually cause the problem. Sometimes it runs through demanding games for hours without a hiccup, then BSOD while I have 3 tabs open in a web browser. Sometimes it bombs out when I'm not even using the computer at all -- I think once it might even have woken from having the screen off (not suspend or hibernate, though) to freeze up.
My main concern is that if I can't reproduce the problem I don't know how to prove that it happens, or determine if it's been fixed after sending it in. What should one do to troubleshoot such a problem, esp. on an integrated system like a laptop, where you can't just start swapping out components until you find the flaky one?
UPDATE: per this post I downloaded and ran BlueScreenView and a) all my BSODs have in fact been 9Fs, b) all have been caused by address "ntoskrnl.exe+71f00" (so I guess my driver theory is out?), and c) there have been 8 on Win7 alone since 11/24, though it seems like it's gotten worse in the last week. Not sure how much that helps, but there you go.
