Why does the blue screen of death occur, and what to do about it?

Per­haps the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem is most famous for its screen of death. It scares in blue, not let­ting the aver­age user under­stand any­thing. This screen appears as a result of a fatal error. Let’s find out what exact­ly can cause the occur­rence of a blue screen. What needs to be done so that it does not appear again?

The main reason for the blue screen of death

Let’s start with the fact that in the lan­guage of devel­op­ers, the occur­rence of a screen of death is called a BSOD. This is a pro­pri­etary fea­ture of dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Win­dows. Oth­er oper­at­ing sys­tems with a sim­i­lar error often just freeze or reboot with­out dis­play­ing any infor­ma­tion. Win­dows, with the help of such a screen, gives some time to under­stand what exact­ly the prob­lem is.

It should be not­ed that if the cause of the prob­lem is not elim­i­nat­ed, then the blue screen of death will occur on a reg­u­lar basis. Most often, it is caused by an error in the dri­vers. Also, the prob­lem may lie in the hard­ware — for exam­ple, RAM began to fail. In some cas­es, sys­tem set­tings reck­less­ly changed by the user lead to the blue screen of death. Final­ly, some poor­ly writ­ten pro­gram may be to blame.

Some PC own­ers tend to blame virus­es for the screen of death. But this is a very rare occur­rence. Espe­cial­ly if a good antivirus is installed on your com­put­er.

Eliminate the cause of the screen of death

If you are faced with a blue screen of death, you need to think about how to elim­i­nate the cause of its occur­rence. If this is not done, this screen will appear reg­u­lar­ly, forc­ing you to restart your com­put­er. One day this will lead to the fact that you will not have time to save the video edit­ing result in the appro­pri­ate pro­gram, los­ing half an hour of your work. Do you need it?

Windows Services

First of all, we rec­om­mend that you “shaman­ize” with the built-in util­i­ty that looks for all sorts of errors. This advice is rel­e­vant for own­ers of PCs with Win­dows 10 on board.

To acti­vate the util­i­ty, go to this path: “Start” — “Set­tings” (gear icon) — “Update and Secu­ri­ty” — “Trou­bleshoot­ing”. This is a list of com­mon prob­lems that may occur with the oper­at­ing sys­tem from Microsoft. Scroll through the list, click on the “Blue Screen” but­ton. Here you need to click on “Run the trou­bleshoot­er”. Now it remains only to fol­low the prompts of the sys­tem, and then wait for the end of the process.

This util­i­ty does not always help. And in old­er ver­sions of the OS, it does not exist at all. There­fore, you should know about anoth­er way to elim­i­nate the cause of the blue screen. It con­sists in view­ing the tips for solv­ing prob­lems that the oper­at­ing sys­tem can offer you. This is done in the fol­low­ing way:

1. Open the Con­trol Pan­el.

2. Go to the “Secu­ri­ty and Ser­vice Cen­ter” sec­tion.

3. Expand the Main­te­nance tab. This is where trou­bleshoot­ing sug­ges­tions can be dis­played. Fol­low them.

4. In old­er ver­sions of Win­dows, the cor­re­spond­ing win­dow opens after going along the path “Con­trol Pan­el” — “Sys­tem and Secu­ri­ty” — “Action Cen­ter”.

Alas, the sys­tem can offer noth­ing. In this case, it remains to solve the prob­lem in oth­er ways.

Determining the Cause of the BSOD

You must have noticed that the blue screen of death con­tains not only the usu­al text. It also con­tains an error code. It can be a set of num­bers and let­ters, or a whole com­bi­na­tion of dif­fer­ent words writ­ten in upper­case and con­nect­ed to each oth­er by under­scores. Why not find out what caused the error indi­cat­ed by the sys­tem?

In the case of Win­dows 10, the screen of death also dis­plays a QR code. You can rec­og­nize it as a mobile appli­ca­tion, and then you will be tak­en to the Microsoft web­site, which con­tains an inter­ac­tive assis­tant to solve the prob­lem. Ear­li­er we already talked about how to rec­og­nize a QR code, so you can eas­i­ly cope with the task.

You can also enter the error code or text in any search engine. So you go to a site where the prob­lem is described, and at the same time meth­ods for solv­ing it are giv­en.

By default, the blue screen occurs for a short peri­od of time, after which the oper­at­ing sys­tem reboots. If this pre­vents you from writ­ing down the error code, you can dis­able auto­mat­ic restart. To do this, do the fol­low­ing:

1. Right-click on the “This PC” icon.

2. Click on “Prop­er­ties”.

3. Select “Advanced sys­tem set­tings”.

4. In the win­dow that appears, go to the “Advanced” tab.

5. Here you need to click “Set­tings”.

6. Uncheck the “Per­form auto­mat­ic restart” check­box.

7. Of course, not every­one wants to car­ry out a tedious search on the Inter­net. There­fore, we decid­ed to give oth­er meth­ods for solv­ing this prob­lem that do not force you to deal with the error code.

Universal Measures

The steps below can be per­formed not only when a BSOD occurs. These mea­sures serve to increase the speed of the com­put­er. There­fore, these actions allow you to elim­i­nate almost all prob­lems, even those not relat­ed to the blue screen of death.

Go to sys­tem set­tings. Here you need to vis­it “Win­dows Update”. Check for updates. If they are, install them. It is pos­si­ble that you got a prob­lem­at­ic assem­bly of the oper­at­ing sys­tem, a piece of code of which leads to a BSOD.

It will not be super­flu­ous to check the OS with an antivirus pro­gram. Each of them has a but­ton that launch­es a full scan. But be pre­pared for it to take a long time.

Test your com­put­er in safe mode. In the case of Win­dows XP, Vista and 7, for this you need to press the F8 key while restart­ing the com­put­er — you will def­i­nite­ly see a but­ton respon­si­ble for switch­ing to safe mode. In the case of more recent ver­sions of the OS, you need to per­form the fol­low­ing steps:

1. Press the key com­bi­na­tion Win­dows + R.

2. In the win­dow that appears, you need to enter the com­mand “mscon­fig” (with­out quotes), after which you should press Enter.

3. In the sys­tem con­fig­u­ra­tor win­dow, go to the “Down­load” tab.

4. Check the “Safe Mode” box.

5. Click on the “OK” but­ton.

6. Restart your com­put­er.

7. To exit safe mode, call this win­dow again. Now you need to uncheck the box “Safe Mode”. And restart your com­put­er again.

There is also a slight­ly eas­i­er way. It con­sists in click­ing on the soft reset but­ton while hold­ing down the Shift key. This will take you to the Select Action screen. Here you need to go to the “Recov­ery” tab, where you should click on the “Restart now” but­ton, locat­ed in the “Spe­cial boot options” sec­tion.

Anoth­er occur­rence of the blue screen of death may be due to prob­lem­at­ic dri­vers. There­fore, we rec­om­mend updat­ing them. This can be done man­u­al­ly. Espe­cial­ly if you have a lap­top at your dis­pos­al — then just go to the web­site of its man­u­fac­tur­er, you will def­i­nite­ly find here all the dri­vers for your lap­top mod­el. If you have a sta­tion­ary PC, and you do not know the names of its com­po­nents, it is bet­ter to use some free ser­vice to find and update dri­vers. For exam­ple, in this case, they can help
dri­ver pack and
dri­ver boost­er.

There are also cas­es when an increased tem­per­a­ture of the proces­sor or video card leads to a BSOD. There­fore, we rec­om­mend that you check this set­ting. To do this, you can use, for exam­ple, the pro­gram
HWMon­i­tor. The fol­low­ing tem­per­a­ture can be con­sid­ered nor­mal:

1. Video card — up to 95°C;

2. Proces­sor — up to 95°C;

3. Hard disk dri­ve (HDD) — up to 50°C;

4. Sol­id state dri­ve (SSD) — up to 70°C.

Ide­al­ly, the tem­per­a­ture should be at least 15–20°C below the upper bar. If it comes close to it, or even exceeds it, some­thing urgent­ly needs to be done to cool the com­put­er.

As a last resort, you can reset the BIOS set­tings. This should be done if noth­ing else helps. Reset can be done by press­ing a spe­cial but­ton locat­ed on the moth­er­board. How­ev­er, it is present only on new mod­els belong­ing to the mid­dle and top price seg­ments. If there is no but­ton, just remove the bat­tery, then press the pow­er but­ton on the com­put­er. Then put the bat­tery back in. After this, you will have to con­fig­ure the BIOS from scratch, be pre­pared for this. This method is espe­cial­ly rel­e­vant if the blue screen of death is dis­played right at the time of load­ing the oper­at­ing sys­tem, which is why you can­not even get to the desk­top.

Some­times prob­lems with the hard dri­ve or RAM lead to the blue screen of death. There­fore, we rec­om­mend check­ing their con­di­tion. For this, spe­cial util­i­ties and tools built into Win­dows are used. Per­haps in the future we will cov­er this in a sep­a­rate arti­cle. By the way, to check the SSD, you can use a free util­i­ty cre­at­ed by the man­u­fac­tur­er of this dri­ve — sim­i­lar pro­grams are being devel­oped by Sea­gate, West­ern Dig­i­tal, and Sam­sung. As for the RAM, every­thing is notice­ably more com­pli­cat­ed with it — it is checked by sev­er­al means at once. To describe the whole process in a cou­ple of lines will not work.

In some cas­es, you will have to restore Win­dows to a pre­vi­ous state. It remains to be hoped that you did not turn off the cre­ation of restore points in order to save disk space. Now you need to use one of these points. Focus on the date — you need to select a point cre­at­ed before the occur­rence of the blue screen of death. We rec­om­mend this method only if noth­ing helps at all — even reset­ting the BIOS set­tings.

You can also try rein­stalling Win­dows. If the screen of death con­tin­ues to appear even after this, then the prob­lem is def­i­nite­ly relat­ed to the hard­ware. But this is a very rad­i­cal way. It is incon­ve­nient if only due to the fact that you have to re-install all the numer­ous pro­grams — from the brows­er to some kind of video edit­ing appli­ca­tion.

The sad­dest sit­u­a­tion is when the BSOD occurs when the com­put­er is turned on. In this case, the blue screen of death does not allow you to get to the desk­top. Many of the meth­ods described above will not work, because you will not be able to run cer­tain util­i­ties. In such a sit­u­a­tion, oth­er algo­rithms of actions are per­formed. It is pos­si­ble that one day we will write an arti­cle on what to do if Win­dows does not boot — this is a sep­a­rate and very exten­sive top­ic.

Conclusion

Now the blue screen of death will not scare you. From now on, you will know that its occur­rence does not mean that the oper­at­ing sys­tem has come to an end. No, you can elim­i­nate the appear­ance of such a screen with­out rein­stalling Win­dows.