Oh no - oh no no no no no! Don’t you frown at me mister!
OK, hopefully this needs no more than a little ctrl-alt-believe.
We’ve all been there.
Just take a deep breath with me, and we’ll work through this together.
This is DIY in 5.
Hey everyone, welcome to DIY in 5. My name is Trisha Hershberger and if you are watching this video,
it may be because you or someone you love has experienced the dreaded Blue Screen of Death,
the screen that shows up in Windows when something has gone drastically wrong.
It’s wildly frustrating, pops up out of nowhere and can be difficult to troubleshoot.
Plus, it’s more than a bit terrifying to think your beloved system may be on its last leg or in need of a costly repair.
Try not to panic, we’ll walk through some basic techniques you can use to diagnose and fix a blue screen of death or BSOD on your own.
If you find the tips in today’s video useful please like this video,
subscribe to this channel and ring that bell so you don’t miss out on any future tech tips.
A blue screen of death is the more common and very picturesque term
for what’s technically called a stop error or fatal system error
and it happens when the operating system crashes due to no longer being able to run safely.
The blue screen of death has seen many iterations over the years with Windows 10 even
having a frowny face just in case you weren’t sad enough about it already. Thanks Windows.
Fortunately, this screen also will tell you some information about what the problem was then it will restart.
GET THAT INFO! Take a picture of it with your phone if you have one nearby since you
can’t copy and paste once you are in BSOD mode and it may restart fairly quickly so move fast!
If you are using Windows 10, you’ll also see a QR code
which will take you directly to Microsoft’s blue screen troubleshooting page on your phone.
but you may not need to get that deep into things... yet.
Causes can range from a random one-time hiccup to a driver issue to operating system errors
to failing hardware so there’s a lot to eliminate when troubleshooting.
But that error code will give you a good place to start digging.
Now, because a random hiccup is the least tricky issue,
give that PC a good ol’ reboot or ctrl-alt-believe as I like to say and hope that it works perfectly fine when started back up.
This may be the case!
Now if you continue to experience BSODs after that, let’s really start digging.
Ask yourself what you were doing on the PC just before things went all blue.
Did you just install a new program, update a driver, start using a new piece of hardware, install a Windows update?
If so, try to rollback that change.
You can either do this manually or use the System Restore tool in Windows to revert to a previous restore point.
If you are using Windows 10, open the control panel and type recovery in the search bar.
Then click Open System Restore and follow the on screen prompts.
While sometimes a driver or windows update can cause a bluescreen error,
other times driver or windows updates might be exactly the fix you need.
Confusing I know, but if the fix is as simple as checking for any pending
updates and applying them, let’s go for it.
Sometimes it might be malware or a virus that’s causing your PC to misbehave.
Messing with system files on the DL.
Use your security checkup of choice either within Windows Defender
or third party like Malwarebytes to find and remove problematic software.
Once this is done, reboot and see if your bluescreen woes are gone for good.
I also want to mention that, while you may be able to try everything we’ve discussed so far within Windows up until this point,
if your computer won’t let you get in far enough to do that, you can try booting Windows into Safe Mode to run
some diagnostics and quickly backup important files.
Safe mode allows you to load a basic, bare bones Windows configuration with just the essentials.
If you can work in safe mode without getting bluescreened,
then something installed, an app or service, could be the culprit.
If you still haven’t found the culprit, perhaps it’s not software, but hardware failure that’s to blame.
It could be a failing stick of RAM, a faulty hard drive or worse.
The good news is a new hard drive or stick of RAM is easy to replace
and certainly simpler than replacing your entire PC!
Here’s where I would go down the deep Google rabbit hole of searching the exact error message
you hopefully took a photo of with your phone when you got that blue screen of death,
because it may help point you in the correct direction.
Windows has built-in monitoring tools to help with System Diagnostics
and even a dedicated Memory Diagnostic tool as well that you can run right from your Windows control panel.
If nothing of note turns up here, there are third party software options out there
to really dig deep if your error code pointed you toward something specific but you just haven’t found it yet.
MemTest86 is a free tool that is more powerful than the built in Windows Memory Diagnostic tool and specifically tests RAM.
CrystalDiskInfo is also free and will specifically test hard drives.
A last resort option, if you still haven’t found the solution, is a fresh install of Windows.
Be sure to back everything up first, then take your PC back to it’s brand new condition right outta the box.
You can do this a few different ways, and some require more patience than others,
but all of them should give your PC a fresh start.
I hope one of these fixes did the trick for you and if so, let us know about
your most recent BSOD experience in the comments.
My last one was a hard drive failure, followed by a SATA cable that needed replacing followed by a bad driver - different computers mind you
otherwise I may have wanted to yeet the thing out the window.
Ah well, happy troubleshooting everyone and may your blue screen misery be ever in your past. Till next time.