Blue Screen of Death!

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LeTiss
Posts: 5386
Joined: Fri May 08, 2009 6:04 pm

This week I've experienced the dreaded blue screen of death of 2 occasions. I was inspired to open a thread because I notice PW tweeted he had the same problem yesterday.

I'm not a computer tech expert at all, so I'm hoping someone here might have some ideas that's causing it - is my hard drive on the blink, is it a virus, could it be a recent windows update, or something else?

Many Thanks
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Euler
Posts: 24702
Joined: Wed Nov 10, 2010 1:39 pm
Location: Bet Angel HQ

Could have been a mare for me on the final, but fortunately it wasn't an issue in the end. I've tried to isolate the reason but have been unable to so far. Hopefully somebody will more insight will come along.
starsabove
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Jan 31, 2011 8:50 pm

Don't know about insight but I had the problem with a new computer with windows 8. It seemed to be related to a piece of software I was trying to install.

After getting an upgrade to windows 8.1 (from microsoft website} the problem has not re-occurred.
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Dublin_Flyer
Posts: 688
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2012 10:39 am

Blue screen is normally hardware related. I've a couple of 2 + 3gb hard drives I use which are on the way out, luckily I only use them for storing music, videos and ebooks.
Without opening up the computer, the easiest way to check is it hard drives is click My Computer, right click on the suspect hard drive, Tools from the top menu, and Error Check. If it's your C drive it will only happen on a restart because the whole drive needs to be accessible, and that can take a huge amount of time depending on the drive size, so can be best to do it overnight. Other drives can be unmounted and scanned with the computer still running but they will be inaccessible.
Alternatively there's a software with a free trial called HD-Tune, you can scan all drives with this and it creates a grid graphic as it progresses, little green boxes are ok parts, little red ones are bad parts which get overwritten or bypassed in the drive, not sure of the technicalities.

Failing that, or passing that, as the case may be, opening up the case and releasing then reseating the RAM sticks can solve it sometimes, again not sure of the technicalities, probably gremlins in the system or witchcraft.

If it happens again there should be a code near the bottom something like ABx000000CB4 or similar, if you google BSOD and the code it might give some results near to what you're looking for and narrow the field a bit.
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