Blue Screen of Death

The dreaded blue screen of death in retrospect doesn't make as many appearances as it used to. Why is this you ask? Well, more and more people have upgraded to Windows XP, and less and less people are using Windows 98 aswell as the BSOD king of OS's, Windows ME. Why is that relevant you ask? Well...

Windows XP is by a long shot the best mainstream OS Microsoft has made to date and it's architecture is inherantly more stable than anything which came before it. This though doesn't mean it's ammune to BSOD's it just means that when they do happen they are more than likely to be a result of a hardware flaw or failure, rather than a software one.

So... if you suddenly start suffering from BSOD's in Windows XP, then do the following before anything else:

1) Run a memory testing program like DOCMEMORY to check to see if your memory is not damaged. BSOD's as a result of problems with memory modules, are one of the most common reasons for XP to resort to flashing you a bit of blue.

2) Boot up in safe mode if you can. If the BSOD's stop occuring when your in this mode, then it's a good sign that the cause of your problems are actually software related after all.

3) If you're overclocking, down clock to your systems default speed, and also it's always good practice to set your memory and bus timings to their least agressive state, when working problems.

Contributed by Spinner