What's the blue screen all about?

What is the blue screen that says "window has experienced a sudden shut down" mean? It's only happened to me five or six times in a year. But I'm curious. Should I be concerned?

 

if you upgrade to vista/windows 7, Microsoft has really cut down on the amount of times your OS will blue screen.... the other 'rare' times, usually it's a miswritten driver or something

 

A properly set up desktop or laptop will rarely BSOD.

 

There is an error code involved in every blue screen. It typically begins with STOP 0x, etc. Each STOP error may be produced by one or more malfunctions, and the error codes themselves help you narrow down the causes. You can review what error messages you've received by opening up the Event Viewer (eventvwr.msc).

Some errors are more serious than others. Common causes include poorly written drivers, malware, and failing hardware. If you want help tracing your particular issue, start by digging up the STOP errors and posting them here.

You can also read about them here:
http://www.aumha.org/a/stop.php

 

Lads, please keep this thread on topic, posts have been deleted. The OP asked about what BSOD means, not anything else.

Thank you,
Johnny T - NBR Moderation Team

 

It is serious, because it means that an error so serious ocurred that Windows' built-in error-handling mechanisms couldn't deal with it, and it crashed.

5 or 6 times sounds like you might have a recurring error, for example, with a device driver that's not set up properly or that has become somewhat corrupted.

At any rate, as another poster said, on every Blue Screen you should see a stop error code, a number in the format of 0x12345678, followed by four similar numbers inside parentheses. The stop code, along with some of the parameters, will often be a good guide to what' causing the crash.

If you've written any of them down, post them up and we'll see what we can make of them.

 

I call it a "feature".

 

I see a BSOD screen every day.

Apple has it as their icon for Windows computers on a network. I must give them props for being funny.

 

Sure. I've had only 1 BSOD on my desktop over the last year, and it wasn't caused by Vista, but by Crisis.

Funny... not. Do they actually believe that PCs get BSODs all the time?

 

Hmm more like extremely childish

 

The icon they use has a BSOD from the Win9x days (when it was centered white text on the blue background). This is not only childish, but horribly outdated.

 

I have had my desktop for nearly one year now, and it's only BSOD'd once and it was because of a botched ATI driver installation.

 

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

 

Sure I have. 50% of people from my school believe those ads. The remaining 50% are my friends