If blue is your favorite color, maybe there is a guaranteed way to start hating it – by seeing it five times a day, accompanies by really charming messages that gently inform you that any unsaved information might be loss or that there was a hardware failure and so on. You guess what I am talking about? Blue Screens of Death, of course. The effects of Blue Screens can vary from causing slight irritation for the user, to real disaster for the data on the computer, to rushing to the computer shop for buying new hardware, etc.

Introduction

Have you ever asked yourself how many steps does your computer perform from the moment you press the power switch to turn it on till the moment your favorite desktop wallpaper shines it its full glory in front of you? Well, there are many steps that the computer performs in order you to be able to enjoy your powerful hardware and your slick software but when a step or two fails to execute and you can't access the contents of your computer, you become more and more interested to know what exactly happens when you boot your computer and what could have potentially gone wrong that turns your ultra high-tech computer into a useless piece of metal (and some plastic, to be more precise).

What are Processes?

Process is one of the core terms in operating systems. The simplest but very precise explanation is that a process is a program in execution, a running instance of a program. In the theory of operating system there are several states of a process, like running, blocked, terminated etc. but this is too much detail for somebody who is just eager to be able to monitor what is going on on his or her computer. (For those, who are interested in more detail, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum are an excellent source of indepth information about processes and operating systems as a whole.)