There have been a few threads about computers Blue Screening recently so I've written a quick guide about how to troubleshoot what's caused it.
What is the Blue Screen of Death?
The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is Windows' way of telling you that something went wrong on your computer. Normally, Windows can recover from errors quite well (often by just terminating a a problem process), however sometimes the error defeats this error recovery capability and causes the operating system to stop everything shut the computer down to prevent damage.
A more in depth article about BSOD's can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Screen_of_Death
What does the Blue Screen do?
It's not just there to tell you that your computer is poorly. It tells you what caused it.
In this example, it tells the user some really useful information.
It tells you the problem: Page fault in non-paged area
It tells you what caused it: spcmdcon.sys
And it also gives you what's called a STOP code, in this case: 0x00000050 and always takes the form 0xZZZZZZZZ, where Z is a number.
How is this helpful?
This may seem like junk information as it doesn't really make much sense to anyone not a complete computer geek, but it can point you in the direction of a load of great information on the internet about how to fix it!
Simply google the STOP code. In this case:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...e+Search&meta=
Look through forum articles, Microsoft Help resources, and other troubleshooting guides; they'll help you to fix the problem.
What causes a Blue Screen of Death?
More often than not, it's hardware failure, or misbehaving drivers. If it's drivers, that's usually easy to fix. The STOP code will diagnose the cause and all you need to do is go to the vendor's support site and download the latest drivers. This should fix the problem.
If it's hardware, you can normally pinpoint it, again from the STOP code. However, sometimes it will be a little non-specific and you might need to use a process of elimination. Most of the time though, it's faulty RAM or graphics cards that cause BSOD's, so they're pretty easy to diagnose if you're confident about opening up your computer.
My computer Blue Screens, but it restarts straight away and I can't read the information on it.
Don't worry, this is easy to fix. Courtesy of
TuneXP
(You'll need to be logged in as an Administrator user to perform these changes)
1. Go to Start -> Control Panel -> System
2. Go to Advanced
3. Under the Startup and Recovery section, click Settings...
4. Under System Failure un-check "Automatically restart"
This should solve the problem and allow you to read the BSOD when it comes up next time.
If you can't boot into Windows at all, you just need to press F8 on startup and select 'disable automatic restart on system failure (Thanks
alex-hs for this tip!)
I'm still having trouble... what can I do?
Ask us. If you've googled the STOP code and still drawn a blank, ask us for advice. A lot of us are quite excellent sleuths and can hunt down information hidden away in the depths of the internet.
For us to help you, though, we'll need the STOP code, and probably a copy of the memory dump Windows carries out when it BSOD's. We can explain how to get that if we need it, though.
To the tech regulars: is there anything else that can/should be added to this guide?
Computing and PC help and advice, programming, games, digital audio, mobile phones and electronic miscellanea.
Useful Resources:
[GUIDE] OMG! My computer's just shown the Blue Screen of Death!
