Blue Screen Errors

Death Of Computer

The Blue Screen of Death(also known as BSD or blue screen error), known officially as a stop error or a bug check is the error screen displayed by the Microsoft Windows family of operating system.The Blue Screen of Death (also known as BSD or Blue Screen Error), known officially as a Stop Error or a bug check, is the error screen displayed by the Microsoft Windows family of operating s upon encountering a critical error, of a non-recoverable nature, that causes the system to crash. The term is named after the color of the screen generated by the error. In Unix-based operating systems, a similar term is kernel panic. Stop errors are hardware , updates and driver related, causing the computer to stop responding in order to prevent damage to the hardware or data. In the later versions of Windows (Windows NT and later) the screen presents information for diagnostic purposes that was collected as the operating system performed a bug check.

History

The term Blue Screen of Death originated during development of the IBM OS/2 operating system at Lattice Inc, the maker of early Windows and OS/2 compilers. Developers encountered the error screen when bugs in the operating system's software (typically null pointers) slipped through the net during beta testing. In feedback to IBM, a company known informally as 'Big Blue', the developers humorously described the Stop screen as the 'Blue Screen of Death' in consequence of its color, of the association of that color with IBM, and of the fatality of the error (which caused the computer to hang without any possibility of recovery, requiring a manual restart.

Details

If configured to do so, the computer will perform a "core dump" and save all data in memory in raw form to a disk file (known as a "dump file") for later retrieval, to assist in the analysis by an expert technician of the causes of the error. It is also possible to manually initiate a BSoD by using a keyboard sequence.

Blue screens are typically caused by software errors in device drivers: in NT-based Windows systems by poorly written device drivers, and in the Windows 9x family of operating systems by incompatible DLL driver files or bugs in the software kernel of the operating system. They can also be caused by physical hardware faults, such as faulty RAM memory or power supplies, overheating of components, or hardware which is run beyond its specification limits ("overclocking").

These errors have been present in all Windows-based operating systems since Windows 3.1. OS/2 suffered from the Black Screen of Death (also BSoD), and early builds of Windows Vista displayed a Red Screen of Death caused by a boot loader error.

Windows 3.x, 95, 98, and ME

Blue Screen Error in Windows7

The first blue screen that resembled an error screen was in the Windows 3.x series. Similar error screens appeared in Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME. These presented an error message against an all-blue background, in 80-column 25-line text mode. The error screen was displayed when there was a critical startup error (such as accessing a hardware driver file that no longer existed), or in the case of some other serious fault such as an unhandled error occurring inside a VxD hardware driver file. The BSOD also occurred during system use if a device driver had to present a modal dialog to the user, such as where a removable disk was removed from the drive whilst a file was being read or written. Unlike in NT-based Windows versions, it is possible to "press any key to continue". Sometimes the system is stable after this.

During a demonstration of a beta version of Windows 98 by Microsoft's Bill Gates, at COMDEX on April 20, 1998, a BSOD incident occurred in public. The computer crashed with a blue screen when his assistant (Chris Capossela, currently Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer) connected a scanner to demonstrate Windows 98's support for Plug and Play devices. This brought applause from the crowd, and Gates replied after a pause: "That must be... er... that must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet! Oddly enough however, Windows 98 goes on to be considered the most stable release in the Windows 9x series.