“Blue” is one of the favorite colors of many people including myself but not when it relates to computer problems. The notorious “blue screen error” also known as the “blue screen error of death (BSOD)” is easily the most dreadful PC problem you will ever come across in your life. And the worst part is, it pops up frequently these days no matter what windows operating system you are using.
The blue screen error has more than one faces – and at least two that I have seen so far. Sometimes the error will show up and the PC will just die, and at other times it will keep rebooting the PC in cycles. If you see the 1st kind of error, an almost dead PC, it is often the less annoying face and easy to deal with. First thing you need to do is cold- restart and see if the error goes away. Most of the time, it will go away for the time being, and you wouldn’t have to worry about it for a while until it reappears a few days later. If you have a laptop, keep pressing the power button until it reboots or take the laptop’s battery off to do a restart.
If your PC on the other hand, keeps rebooting in cycles, this is a bigger problem. Try pressing the “F8” key, to get to the menu from where you can try booting in the safe mode and stop the continuous booting cycle.
Stop the Continuous Booting Cycle
1. Go to the start menu. Right click on “computer” or “my computer” and select “properties”
2. Then choose “advanced system settings”. Press “yes” to confirm.
3. Choose the “advanced” tab on the top menu. Then choose “settings” for “startup and recovery option”. You will get the following screen as in image 1 below.
4. Deselect “automatically restart” and hit OK. By doing this, you have not fixed the blue screen error! You just stopped the PC reboot again and again.
Perform Checks when in Safe Mode
Go to “start menu” -> “control panel” – > Under “systems and security” select “find and fix problems” -> again “systems and security – the 5th option” -> select “check for performance”. After running this check, the system may recommend some options, like “a list of programs that you should stop running at startup”. Select those programs and go along with systems recommendation to stop those programs automatically run at startup except your antivirus program.
After completion of this performance check, reboot the PC and see if it boots, this time in the regular mode. If it boots alright, 1st thing to do is run a complete virus scan on your system. After the virus scan, go to the systems and security check again mentioned above (the 5th option) and run “fix problems with windows update”. Most of the time windows update will fix problem like this.
Even after doing the update, if you experience the blue screen error, you will need to start your event viewer, identify the problem that is occurring and take it to Microsoft support for a solution. I am going to talk about it little later.
The main reason a blue screen error occurs is – resource blockage due to your own system’s limitations or limitations that was created by a virus, malware or a spyware intentionally. Some programs or drivers may create a system bottleneck, and as a result your PC is failing again and again to access its resources that it needs to keep functioning. The PC finds no other option to keep processing with sufficient resources, and dumps all the data into a dump file before going to sleep.
Two Useful Tips – Blue Screen Preventive Actions
- These days, we plug in so many USB devices and Bluetooth wireless devices into our PC or laptop. This is also a major reason for creating resource conflicts and shortages. Better not to use too many USB devices at once unless you really need them all together. More specifically, if you use wireless internet connections to connect to the internet, do not keep your wireless USB modem or the USB dongle plugged in to the USB port, when you start your PC or laptop. Let it start without it first, and when the booting process stops, then connect your USB modem into the slot. This tip is only for those folks who are troubled with this blue screen error, not for everyone.
- Another important point to remember is not to run too many programs at startup. All the programs sitting on the right hand side of your taskbar could easily be a trouble maker. Evaluate if they are all from trustable sources, and if not get rid of them. When you have a program running on taskbar, it means you have given it as much freedom it needs on your PC to do a wide range of things including cracking your system resources if it wishes. If there is one such program that you feel creating some trouble and you also don’t need it much, just take it out of your taskbar and block it for some time and see the result.
How to Run Event Manager to Get Details Information about an Error?
Event manager keeps saving all the events that take place on your PC including errors and warnings. By using event manager properly, we can identify recurrent errors, and get detail information about it. Once we have the detail information, we can try to resolve it by ourselves, a techie or get in touch with Microsoft to have them check it out why it is taking place. Lets walk-you-through the steps on how to use the even manager;
- Go to the start menu and “under search programs and files type “eventvwr” as shown in image 2 below.
- After saying “yes’ on the user account control screen, the event manager windows as shown in image 3 will appear.
- There are five types of events that take places and recorded in your PC. The blue screen error is more likely a system error, so go to the system events. You can see on the right side there are more than 59 thousands system events already recorded in my PC so far. Once you get inside the system events you will see a list of all the events starting from today and ending on the date when your PC was first configured with this operating system. Events that are related with an error or a warning will be marked as shown in image 4 below.
- Considering the blue screen error occurred in your PC just a while ago, try to find this out from the list. It should be right somewhere below, marked in red, and easily identifiable. After you have identified it, click on it and get the detail information on it as shown in image 5 below.
- Now as you have all the information about the error, you will be better equipped to look for a solution. You can search about it on Google or contact an IT expert who can help you with that. You should also contact Microsoft support center here:http://support.microsoft.com/select/?target=hub and ask them for a solution; they might remote login to your PC and fix it for you easily.
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