Blue Screens of Death

[max99]

If you're concerned about installing SP2, make a backup image of your C: drive first. If everything goes disastrously wrong, you can quickly put everything back the way it was before.

You can use the 30 trial of Drive Snapshot and store the image on your external drive. It's always a good idea to have a recent backup image anyway, so you never have to install everything again from scratch.

Drive Snapshot can be downloaded here, or you can use Norton Ghost or Acronis TrueImage.

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm

[Defenestration]

Every so often I get Blue Screens of Death, this may happen under stress or just random low stress usage.

I can't see what it says on the BSOD due to the PC restarting an instant after.

BSOD's are nearly always caused by a faulty driver or hardware (normally a driver). To stop it automatically re-starting after BSOD:

1) Go to Control Panel->System
2) Under the Advanced tab, click the Settings button under "Startup and Recovery"
3) Un-tick "Automatically restart" under System failure.

You can also configure the type of dump generated and the folder where the dump is placed (defaults to "%SystemRoot%\Minidump" which is usually C:\WINDOWS\Minidump).

The guide mentioned by grayg1 gives you a good overview. As mentioned in this guide, you will need to use an app like WinDbg to view the dump file. Once the dump file is loaded, it will often give you an indication of the driver (file ending with ".sys") that's causing the BSOD. You can then view the file properties for this driver to the version number and what it's for, and then Google to see if a newer driver exists.

I would recommend installing SP2 as that may solve your problem.

For imaging, StorageCraft's ShadowProtect Desktop is the premier solution IMO (version 3 is due out soon), although you have to request a trial version. Alternatively, Terabyte Unlimited's Image For Windows/DOS/Linux is also very good.

[bluesatin]

The problem seems to be fixed after I uninstalled the drivers and software, let windows reboot after each and then re-install it.

Haven't had a BSOD in *Checks PCWizard2007*. . . . . 242 Minutes (4 hours or something right?)
In that time I've been doing heavy gaming, watching an episode of House on my main drive, and from the Maxtor External drive

As a side note your problem might only be fixed with SP2 with the drive being USB and a quick check for Maxtor onetouch reveals USB2.0 spec. I think SP2 added USB2.0 don't quote me on it.

If I remember correctly SP2 only adds that it will install USB2.0 drivers itself (I think Microsoft didn't have the license before SP2), but with drivers from your vendor it is fine
I remember I didn't have USB2.0 for ages not realising I didn't have it, I then installed the Via 4-in-1 USB drivers and it started working on my AV8-MX (AMD Socket 939)

I also have Symantec Ghost for drive imaging, I used it on my Laptop so I could install whatever I wanted and could just restore it if I ever needed to.
My Dad has been using it for ages and it does the job excellently (My Dad is a school IT technician)

My Dad likes doing things oldschool and well, he gets jobs done that a lot of people wouldn't have a clue, he is amazing.