Windows 10 22H2 - BSOD - Blue Screen of Death - Hard Lock - Soundmax Card - Dell Precision T3500

Question

Good Morning,

Since Friday October 27, I have been experiencing a rash of BSOD across our Organization. I have about 300 old Dell Precision T3500 PCs and all have a SoundMAX Integrated Digital High Definition Audio sound card in them. I have another couple hundred different model PCs as well, but none of those have had any issues. The only ones that are experiencing issues are the T3500s.

If you have anything plugged into the audio port (round green audio jack) on the sound card, (like speakers for example) you will eventfully get a BSOD, or a hard lock where everything is just frozen. Unplug it or disable the sound card in Device Manager and the problem goes away. It never creates a mini dump and if you do manage to get as far as a BSOD it always sticks at 0%. This is making it difficult to see what is happening.

I control our updates through WSUS and there have been no new updates from there. However, Microsoft Edge Webview2 Runtime and Microsoft Edge did update to version 118.0.2088.76 starting Friday. That's the only real change I see. Unfortunately, Microsoft has made it incredibly difficult to roll back or remove edge so I can see if that is the issue.

Event viewer lists nothing unusual other than the system experienced an unexpected shutdown.

What I'm looking for is a way to log all activity up to the point of failure. Is there a way to do this other than the native options that don't seem to be helping me. Or maybe there is a better way to configure the native options so that they are far more granular.

Thanks for any help

Eric

Answer 1

Looks like you may be on your own on this one as Dell does not support windows 10 on a T3500

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Answer 2

is a better way to debug this issue so I can at least narrow down what is causing it to happen?

Dell explicitly says the T3500 cannot run windows 10 so this is the crux of the issue. Even though 10 installs and seems to work it likely will be unstable which seems to be your experience as well.

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Answer 3

You can follow along here.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/debugger-download-tools

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Answer 4

Thanks for the info everybody. The problem is our Antivirus software, well, one particular piece of our antivirus software, and any system with the sound card mentioned above. We're phasing those systems out anyway, but it will take some time. Our antivirus people are working on a work around.

Thanks

Eric