The Causes of the Blue Screen of Death

It is most natural that when we encounter a problem, we think first of what may have caused it. Consequently, when a user is faced with the uncomfortable and annoying problem of a blue screen of death, the first thing to do is to find out what causes it. There are mainly four causes of this problem, which all lead to this and the unique solution of restarting your computer. The main cause would be a conflict between the operating system and the drivers for a newly installed piece of hardware.

Also, the blue screen of death may appear because of the hardware itself or because you have installed some new software. It sometimes happens that this fatal error is caused by viruses and malicious files, but not so often, because usually, viruses cause more severe damage to a system.

Moreover, the blue screen of death or the BSoD, as it is also known, occurs because of overheating or failure of one of the computer components. These would be the main causes for the appearance of this error, which seemed to just shut down Windows operating systems with apparently no reason and make the user lose all of its unsaved information.

According to Daniel Pearson, the Windows Product Support Lead, in most of the cases, what causes the Blue Screen of Death is an unhandled exception in the device driver. As user mode processes are not all together in Windows, if one is access violated, it only deals with itself, not with all the other processes. With kernel mode, a device driver is running, the components are trusted, so they can access a full list of addresses.

The Blue Screen of Death has to do with hard drive problems, registry problems, malicious files and it must be solved one way or another. As far as hard drives are concerned, you must know that this where your programs are, your applications and your system components as well. If an NTFS_FILE_SYSTM occurs, your hard drive may be corrupt and not communicate properly with other computer components, which leads to the BSoD.

As about registry, this is where the configurations, settings, system components and applications are. When a user installs or uninstalls something (programs, drivers, applications), they appear or disappear from the registry. If these different entries are corrupt, then the registry deals with different problems and so, the BSoD occurs. ‘Registry error’ may appear on the BSoD when startup and shutdown do not function properly.

Another cause of the BSoD may be Trojans, bugs, worms or viruses, which affect the system components, by modifying different registry settings after their installation and which can also affect the startup and shutdown functions.

Simply put, users are faced with the Blue Screen of Death if applications do not work properly, either because an illegal instruction has been accessed, because the user has accessed invalid data or he has performed an invalid operation. In these cases, there appears a Fatal Exception Error, which appears as error codes in a hexadecimal form – The Blue Screen of Death.