Last week I had 10 BSOD’s crashing the hell out of my windows XP machine at work, I knew what the problem was related to though as I had created a new TrueCrypt container which was larger than the one I had been using without problem for two years now.

As my dropbox storage availability was going up, the container holding the data was staying at 4GB so I had to do something as having to move files each day due to the virtual drive filling up was becoming tedious..

I had benchmarked the fastest algorithm as AES which was not the previous one I had been using (twofish) so decided to switch to that so program file access would drag a little less…

So I have a FAT AES 6GB partition and two times a day the machine BSOD’s after years of stability. If you are having blue screens then the starting point is to download the free utility BlueScreenView to check out what those memory dumps contain which pointed out that fastfat.sys was the problematic driver.


Upgrading TrueCrypt from version 6.3 to 7 and changing the algorithm back to twofish did not help as 10 mins later it happened again.

So two days ago I decided to create a new AES NTFS 6GB partition to remove the FAT driver from the equation and two days on not a single bluescreen… fingers crossed it continues to be stable.

Another freeware program from the makers of BlueScreenView that I used years ago and think is great is ShellExView which you can use to trim the crap out of your right click menus so you can be more efficient with less clutter.