A Blue Screen of Death (also known as a stop error, BSOD or bluescreen) is an error screen displayed by certain operating systems, most notably Microsoft Windows, after encountering a critical system error.

There are a lot of possible causes for blue screen errors, but most of them relate to the computer hardware. The cause of a blue screen error can be a temperature problem, a timing error, a resource conflict, hardware failure, a corrupt registry, a virus or simply a device incompatibility or driver error.

 

How to analyze blue screen errors

The first thing to do to analyze a blue screen error is to check the meaning of the STOP error code. You need to stop Windows from rebooting when a STOP error is encountered. Once the blue screen of death is shown, you can check the meaning of the STOP error code. Together with the filename of the driver or module, this will give an indication of the error cause.

The most common cause of blue screen errors is a device driver problem. Outdated, incorrect or corrupt drivers can cause the system to encounter a STOP error, resulting in the blue screen. The easiest way to fix this problem is just removing the driver from system using windows safe mode or just restore the windows to an earlier time.

Other causes of BSOD :

• Hard Drive Failure – A hard disk contains subdivisions of tracks, called sectors. Each sector holds a fixed amount of data. On occasion these sectors can go bad and may cause the Blue Screen Of Death.
  Memory faults can easily cause blue screen errors. Vista and Windows have a built-in option to test the memory, for XP you can use a program called memtest86.
• Virus Infection – Sometimes the virus infection can turn your screen in a fake “blue screen of death”. Check your system – run a virus scan and spyware scan after updating your definition files.