I'd decided to switch to another laptop, a Dell Lattitude E5550 , which I took through a 12 hour test running atem software control + a zoom conference, broadcasting to youtube.
Got no crashes, so I used the computer for 2 jobs... And then got 3 "switchers.sys" crashes in 2 days ! And this time, on one of the jobs I was not using Zoom but gotowebinar (and that's the day I got 2 crashes), so I don't think the problem is specifically linked to zoom.
My opinion is now that this is probably a more widespread problem than I first thought. Switching to a completely different laptop did not make the crashes go away (went from an HP elitebook to a dell lattitude, both pretty common machines). Also I now got crashes even when not using zoom.
I believe a lot of people have not come across the problem simply because they were lucky enough and/or because they don't use the atem for very long sessions. Every time I got a crash, it was after at least 3 hours of broadcasting. So maybe most users do shorter sessions. This would also explain why Blackmagic support told me they couldn't reproduce the issue: because they didn't test for long enough. In my case, I tested the Dell Lattitude for 12 hours without a crash, but afterwards I did get one !!
This kind of unpredictability totally kills the product for me. Could Blackmagic please look into this issue seriously ?
It would also be great if some PC users tried running very long tests and see if they get the dreaded "switchers.sys" BSOD crash and report back here. It's important to connect PC and atem using USB. I use a little app call whocrashed (
https://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed) to easily read the crash dumps.