Does the Blue Screen of Death only Appear under Windows XP?

I have a dual boot computer, and lately have been getting the BSOD. It is an ASUS A8Ne motherboard with an AMD Opteron 170, 2 gigs of ram, a 150 Gig Raptor(SATA), two EIDE WD Caviar drives, two DVDburners, an ATI Radeon 3870 vid card, a CL X-Fi audio sound card. I also recently installed an Enermax 650watt PS. During POST, I can hit F8, and get a boot menu. I select the Raptor if I want to boot into XP, or I can select the 120gig Caviar to get into Vista Ultimate.
The BSOD says Machine_Check_Exception. The stop code is:
0X0000009C(0X00000004,0X8054E5F0,0XB2000000,0X000F0F0F)
I googled this, and it seems to imply a hardware problem. If that is so, then I should also see something pop up under Vista. I don't. Is there such a thing as a BSOD under Vista?
It has been long enough ago that I made my last or most recent hardware change, that I can't believe that it is the fault of some hardware. Could it be a CPU overheat? It is cooled by a Zalman fan that is rheostatically controlled. I have the RPM turned way down, but a program called fan speed tells me that the CPU is running around 40 degrees. I don't have a clue on how to proceed. I can reboot and the computer seems to run fine for a while. Over a one week period, the BSOD has appeared maybe 5 times. I always seem to be able to recover-for a while.

 

Use the information here:
http://www.windowsbbs.com/general-discussions/33471-dump-data-collection-tool-instructions.html
to get dump readouts.

There should be one for each blue screen. Check them, post two or so here if the main information is similar. Are they all 0X0000009C?

Not many of the members can read dump readouts in depth. Occasionally we are visited by more experienced members.

Matt

 

HI Matt,
I followed your link to JoeHobart's post and tried following the instructions.
I did find a user.dmp file under C:/Docs&settings....DrWatson. It is 1,051KB ,but, it appears to have been created at 1001am-today. The last time I had a blue screen was yesterday evening. When I did a search for *.dmp, I got about 20 results. Only two seem relevant, as they are dated yesterday evening. All of the others are from early 2008 and late 2007, when I evidently had some issues, but have frankly forgotten about. Anyway, the two relevant ones are both created at 8:46pm yesterday. They both reside on drive E, which is the drive that has my Vista Ultimate install. One is called MEMORY.DMP and is in the E:/WINDOWS directory. It is 198,411KB.
The other one is is called Mini011409-01.dmp and resides in the E:\Windows\minidump folder and is 136KB. Strangely, the search result did not list the user.dmp file in the C:\Docs&Settings...Dr.Watson folder.
I'm afraid I'm at a loss as to how to handle the debugging tools. I did download the 32bit debugging tool from Microsoft: dbg_x86_6.10.3.233.msi
and ran it. I also downloaded the debugwiz.zip, but haven't done anything with it yet. When I ran the microsoft tool, I was presented with a large empty field with a series of options across the top. Can you tell me what to do from there?
Thanks Matt.
Vic
PS Thanks Arie. I guess I should have asked whether the BSOD appears under Vista. I did know that the earlier versions of Windows had 'em, because I do recall seeing some in the days of win95,98,etc.


PPS-Boy is my face red. Looking under this post, under similar threads, I see my post from February 2008-when I did infact get the BSOD under Vista. Ah, the joys of old age!

 

In the MS debugger, you go to File -> Open Crash Dump and navigate to the location of the file. Arie has supplied the the debugging wizard to make it easier (less technical).

Just from the XP vs Vista standpoint, could the Vista OS be running a more "adequate" set of drivers? Be careful where you get driver updates, I don't trust anything that thinks it can "scan" for the drivers. I identify the hardware myself and get driver updates from the hardware manufacturer's website.

It could be a third party program problem or, say, the way XP and Vista run the hardware (but that might go back to drivers).

When you open the dumps, it should say the operating system at the beginning. XP and Vista interact strangely sometimes when dual-booted.

Matt