BSoD on Win10 laptop

[astraljenga]

I've seen other posts related to this but nothing with a solution. My laptop has been experiencing continuous blue screen of death (BSoD) errors for the past few months, most often "critical process died." I have reset and carefully installed things one by one. Uninstalled/reinstalled Dropbox a few times. It is clearly the culprit. Even when I don't let it sync any files directly to the hard drive and tell it to keep everything online-only, running it still eventually results in a BSoD, and then the laptop refuses to recognize there's even a hard drive installed until I try to boot from a copy of Win10 on a USB stick. I adore Dropbox and was using it constantly, so I don't want to just quit using it, but it's breaking my computer. Any ideas?

[Lusil]

Hey there @astraljenga, 

Welcome to the Dropbox Community!

Sorry to hear about that - let's see what we can do. 

As a first step, could you please ensure that you have the latest stable version installed (81.4.195) by hovering over your Dropbox icon?

Please remember that a beta version can be recognized by a xx.3.xx, instead of the xx.4.xx, so if you’re on a beta build, it means that you have opted in to Early Releases in your online account settings.

Let me know what you find!

[Rich]

Have you looked up any of the errors provided by the BSOD? Anaylized the dump file that Windows creates? Without information about the process that crashed, the error message, etc., it's difficult to know how best to assist you.

[astraljenga]

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@Lusil wrote:

Hey there @astraljenga, 

Welcome to the Dropbox Community!

Sorry to hear about that - let's see what we can do. 

As a first step, could you please ensure that you have the latest stable version installed (81.4.195) by hovering over your Dropbox icon?

Please remember that a beta version can be recognized by a xx.3.xx, instead of the xx.4.xx, so if you’re on a beta build, it means that you have opted in to Early Releases in your online account settings.

Let me know what you find!

---

I never opted into Early Releases, and though I've uninstalled Dropbox (after the error occurred again, prompting this post), I'm certain it was the latest stable version available. 

[astraljenga]

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@Rich wrote:

Have you looked up any of the errors provided by the BSOD? Anaylized the dump file that Windows creates? Without information about the process that crashed, the error message, etc., it's difficult to know how best to assist you.

---

As I said in my original post, the most common error was "critical process died," which I subsequently Googled and went down a rabbit hole updating drivers and running chkdsk and all the other things they tell you to do to eliminate possibilities. The dump file said the memory management kernel ntoskrnl.exe was to blame each time, coinciding with Dropbox attempting to sync or index files. The error never occurred when Dropbox wasn't running. 

[Lusil]

Thanks for checking that out for us, @astraljenga!

I've followed up with a ticket to the email address associated with your Community profile so that we can further look into this matter together. 

When you have the chance, please check your inbox and we'll take it from there. Cheers!

[Daphne]

Hi there @astraljenga,

Just wanted to follow up here and see if the issue you were having has been resolved? If so, would you mind sharing here the steps that you took to do so?

We'll be looking forward to your update - cheers!