Killing Off a Driver That Was Causing DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION Blue Screens
Records troubleshooting repeated DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION blue screens on a Dell laptop, eventually tracing it to and uninstalling the SmartByte network driver.
Machine-translated from the Chinese original.
As a Dell user, I used to often notice a process called SmartByte Telemetry in Task Manager. SmartByte’s job is to balance network bandwidth usage across different software to prevent stuttering when streaming content, but a lot of articles online report that SmartByte not only fails to do its job, but even slows down the network.
But from my own experience, SmartByte didn’t seem to affect my network experience either, so I just left it there; who knows, maybe it would come in handy someday.
Then recently, for several days in a row, opening the Chrome address bar and typing a few characters would immediately cause a blue screen with the error DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION, which felt off. At first I thought it was a Chrome problem, but today the blue screen happened again even while Chrome wasn’t running.
This problem had already seriously disrupted my experience, so I started digging in. The debugging methods online all seem to require analyzing dump files, which is a hassle. I opened Dell’s built-in SupportAssist directly and checked its History, which showed some information about the blue screen errors.
The problem pointed straight at the SmartByte Traffic Control Callout Driver, version 9.8.4.9, at the path C:\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\SmbCo10X64.sys.
No point hesitating; I just uninstalled it.
The blue screen problem seems to be resolved for now.
That said, SupportAssist’s history doesn’t seem all that reliable either; maybe some system errors just never get logged at all.