The Red Screen of Death

Since users have so many problems with the blue screen of death error, are there more such errors? Is there also a red screen of death and is it more dangerous? Well, the red screen of death, also known as RSoD or the Red Screen of Doom, is the Windows Vista variant of the well-known blue screen of death. It vanished in the case of the Beta 1 version of Windows Vista except for the case of boot loader errors. It very rarely appears with the Windows 98 operating system version, too. Also, the red screen of death also denotes a fatal error in new versions of Lotus Notes, where it has the form of red black-bordered windows.

This fatal exception lets users know that there are serious problems with their system. Unlike its blue correspondent, the red screen is much worse, signalling only serious errors. Microsoft employees claim that the red screen only appeared after producing forced setup modifications and major registry ones, so users should encounter it less frequently.

In the cases of Vista and Windows 7 operating systems, the Windows Error Reporting is an improved one. It is very likely that with these operating systems, the message is rather ‘Microsoft Windows Operating System is not responding’, at the sight of which users have to close the program or wait for the program to respond. Although these messages seem less dangerous and extreme, they still lead to the loss of in-working information.

Some of the causes of the red screen of death may sound familiar if you know how things stand with the blue screen of death error. For example, if you have just installed pieces of hardware or software on your computer, this error may occur because of their incompatibility with Vista operating system. In this case, Vista users should uninstall those pieces of software/hardware and restart the system. The same solution works in the case of software conflict.

Some red screens of death may require the repairing of the operating system. Under these circumstances, as a user, you should introduce a DVD with Vista operating system and not let the DVD install, but choose to ‘Repair Your Computer’, running a ‘Start Up Repair’.

Another fixing method of this fatal error would be to turn off the Automatic restart on fatal error message which appears with the red screen of death, this way being able to identify the error which led to its occurrence and look for a way to solve it properly, in order not to have any further problems with it.

There is also the option of extracting core Windows files, a reason for this fatal error being the infection with different malicious files, just like in the case of the blue screen of death. Also like in the case of the blue screen of death, the red screen of death may also occur because of destructive changes in the registry.

Evidently, very similar - the two screens of death, experts are trying their best and promise to prevent any further appearances of the blue and red screens of death, perfecting operating systems as much as possible so that they do not fall victims of these fatal errors which compromise both their systems and their work.