What causes The blue screen?

Is there any one component in particular that causes the blue screen of death to appear? I've started getting a couple followed by an auto-restart. I've also been having some general stability problems after upgrading that weren't there before, but anyway...

The blue-screen is a last ditch effort by the OS to tell you what went wrong. It can literally be caused by anything. If you tell us the exact message, we could probably help you fix it.

Thanks! Next time it happens I'll copy it and post it.

What OS are you running, I think 2K and XP save the messages somewhere.

Does the blue screen happen with XP? I haven't had it happen since upgrading from Win98 3 months ago at home and moving from win95 to 2000 at work last month.
Keeping fingers crossed.

It can happen with Windows XP and 2000, but it happens far less often than in 9x.

Redstone said:

Does the blue screen happen with XP? I haven't had it happen since upgrading from Win98 3 months ago at home and moving from win95 to 2000 at work last month.
Keeping fingers crossed.

Click to expand...

does it ever.. I got the blue screen many, many times. Once was due to RAM that decided to flunk on me, but i don't know for sure if that was the problem since i don't know how to test DDR ram. All i know is when i replaced it i didn't get the screen anymore. Second time was cause i think my 30 gig hd went out. I had tried a reinstall after the screen a few times but the computer couldn't locate the drive. However, the drive is running fine in a diff computer. I'm lost on that one too. If anyone can provide insight please, go ahead.

The BSOD *does* happen in NT/XP, but the default option is to automatically reboot and write the message to a logfile on the hard disk instead of displaying it. You can adjust its behavior in Control Panels/System/Advanced/Startup And Recovery -- if you tell it to not reboot automatically, you will get the BSOD as usual.

That said, it happens a lot less than it does with the Win95-derived kernels, at least in my experience.

As for exactly what causes it -- it's some sort of error in the kernel, which could be caused by a variety of things. Common hardware causes are an overclocked memory/CPU corrupting data, or causing a CPU register to mis-latch (same basic effect). Failing hard drives are another frequent culprit. NT/XP is much more resistant, however, to badly behaving programs (except for low-level drivers and the like), and will not usually die if a program tries to overwrite system memory or does bad things to operating system resources.

Hmmm the one component most responsible for the BSOD appearing, would be the monitor. I've never ever seen it on a system without a monitor attached.

Road Warrior

ME hot stability tip.

I know ME got a bad stigma from the start but I use it and have very few problems and here's my secret.

Install ME and do not do ANY of the M$ updates of any kind, none, leave ME bare butt-nekid and it runs great with stability problems and the "blue screen screams" few and far between.

I run a good AV and Firewall along with Norton Utilities to keep it tuned up and IMHO ME is a darn good OS. When XP first came out I tried it, thanks but no thanks, put it on the shelf and went back to good ole' ME. Try it and see. OldBird