Yesterday morning I had a BSOD in Windows 7 x64 but when I looked for the dump or minidump files, neither was there (the last one was precisely a month ago yesterday, and did create a MEMORY.DMP file) ...

yah, for minidumps the exe's you point the debugger to have to match the ones that created the dump. This isn't an issue for kernel or full memory dumps (though for those you still need the symbol ...

When Windows crashes, it collects information about the crash during the time that the Crash Screen is displayed. At this point, the OS collects information from running applications, drivers, ...

My Windows PC doesn't crash as often as it did in the Windows 7 era, and I haven't seen any of those dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD) messages, the one thing you could always count on Windows to ...