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Page 1 of 5 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.
I was joking about the negative feelings towards the blue color
because of frequent Blue Screens but if you really want (or have
reasons – for instance if you are color blind), you can open
the system.ini file and change the Screen of Death to be in a
different color. More information about what to do after you open the
system.ini can be found here.
Anyway, colors of Screens of Death vary across devices and
operating systems – from yellow (Mozilla XML parsing errors),
to green (TiVo devices), to black (OS/2 and Windows), so it's up to
you to decide if you'll keep it blue or change it. And as rumor goes,
in Windows Vista there will be a red Screen of Death, too – for
really serious stop errors. Nice color – a reminder for the one
that has been used for centuries in corrida. Let's just hope that
users do not react like bulls.
Some humor (or sarcasm) certainly helps
but now let's get serious about the topic and start exploring why
Blue Screens appear and what to do when you frequently see them.
Why Blue Screens Appear
Technically, Blue Screens appear to prevent the system from a more
serious error and damage. They are displayed when the system detects
an error or problem, from which it cannot recover. The system stops
(that is why the official name of Blue Screens is “Stop
Error”), writes the contents of memory on disk (memory dumps),
if this is enabled for the system and displays a text-mode error
message with information about the condition that caused the error.
Blue Screens can appear at any time – during installation, at
startup, or randomly without any apparent reason. Some of the most
common reasons for BSoDs are:
- drivers
- hardware
- conflicts between programs
- file inconsistencies or registry errors
It is not normal for Blue Screens to happen often. In fact, Blue
Screens are not supposed to be a “feature” of Windows. So
if you see them often and you are still able to boot Windows, you'd
better pay them attention before they force you to do it and above
all - try to figure out what causes them. If you have recently made
hardware changes, this is one possible reason for Blue Screens.
Physical failures in all kinds of hardware – memory, disks,
cards, etc. - can be a reason for blue screens.
The latest versions of Windows, like XP and 2003 are more stable
and can recover after a couple of Blue Screens but sometimes even a
single Blue Screen can make your Windows unbootable and you will have
to reinstall your operating system. Generally, the information in a
Blue Screen helps identify the possible reasons and sometimes even
the exact reason (if you see a driver listed in the Blue Screen text
message then you can be almost certain that this driver is the
suspect) but there are also many cases when the text messages of the
Blue Screens are so vague that it's not possible to guess what went
wrong. Have a look at the troubleshooting sections of this article
for suggestions how to deal with Blue Screens.
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