Can someone please explain what a windows minidump is?

Question

I just got a message saying "Your System has recovered from a serious error". These files seem to be responsible somehow to this error:

C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini


Can anyone please explain what this means in laymans terms please???

Answer 1

when windows crashes it dumps a copy of the contents of memory into a file so that someone who understands these things can analyse what was in memory at the time of the crash and figure out the cause

a minidump is a copy of just the core part of the computer's memory rather than all of it - the reason for this is that a lot of people these days have a gigabyte of memory or more and copying all of that to hard disk can take a long time

don;t worry unduly about this - these dump files are not the cause of the problem they are the result

for home use they are not important - in a corporation where data is critical a dump file can be extremely useful

Answer 2

You will get the "recovered from a serious error" notice when you don't shut down your computer properly. For example, the power fails or a misbehaving program makes your computer crash and you turn it off at the power switch.

In the case of a crash, the minidump helps Microsoft figure out why Windows might be incompatible with a program. That's if you click on the "send this information to Microsoft" button.

If Microsoft gets reports from a lot of people about a particular program crashing, then all those minidumps help them figure out why the crashes are occurring.