Driver Verifier can be used to find offending thid party drivers in case no responsbible third party drivers have been indicated after a crash analysis. It will help provoke existing bugs in drivers and make it more easy for them to crash. If there is a case which is hard to reproduce, then Driver Verifier may be useful. Also if a driver crashes because of verifiers special actions, a crash dump will be generated by the system which provides a lot of useful information that can be used by WhoCrashed to provide the root cause of the problem.

How to start Driver Verifier

Click Start then Run and type verifier.exe. Unless you have knowledge of the Windows kernel, it is suggested that you run verifier with standard settings and enable it on all suspected third party drivers. The system needs to be restarted after settings have been applied.

Using Driver Verifier

After restarting your system with verifier enabled, it is much more likely to bug check soon. The system might crash already during the boot phase. After you have experienced one or several system crashes with Driver Verifier, run WhoCrashed again. WhoCrashed will likely provide you more useful information about the root cause of the system crash and give you better suggestions on how to solve it. Switch off Driver Verifier when you are done with it. Due to the many sanity checks and fault injections it dramatically impacts system performance so it's not suggested to normally operate your computer while verifier is running unless this is required to provoke a system crash.

If your system crashes all the time

If you cannot get access to your system because it crashes all the time or even during the boot phase with verifier enabled, you may need to boot your system into safe-mode to switch off verifier.

More information on using Driver Verifier

Please check the following MSDN article: Driver Verifier.

· Introduction