How do I fix a blue screen error?
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So blue screens, they happen.
They can be frustrating.
Let's talk about them.
First of all, what are they?
A blue screen is really Window's response
to a situation that it has absolutely no idea of how to handle.
Something has gone so dramatically wrong
that Windows can only throw up its hands, throw up a blue screen and not make
the damage worse, whatever the damage might have been.
If you're not backing up,
this is a good time to remind you that you should be backing up.
Because if your machine is blue screening,
especially if it's blue screening regularly, then backing up is what you'll
want to have in place to protect your data.
Because, as we'll see,
it could be hardware failures, it could be software failures,
it could be completely benign, and it could be completely destructive.
The only way you're certain of not losing anything is to have your backup in place.
So Windows is throwing up his hands.
It doesn't know what it's doing.
What do you do?
I'm going to draw a distinction between
what I'll call one off blue screens and repeated blue screens.
The one off blue screen is one of those
things that can just happen randomly for a variety of reasons.
It could be a software issue that might
get updated with the next patch and you never see it again.
It could be a hardware issue that just
happened to be transient and never happens again.
I'm told that it could even be something as simple as a cosmic Ray.
I have a hard time with that,
but I've been told the point being is that if you get a blue screen and it
happens just once out of the blue, then reboot carry on and you're probably fine.
If it happens only once,
there's usually nothing to worry about, and that's exactly what I do.
If I get a blue screen, I will reboot.
I will carry on, and unless it starts to happen more, I basically ignore it.
I don't worry about it.
If I need to pull out my backup, great.
But normally I don't.
Normally a one off blue screen is pretty benign.
The problem, of course, is when it starts happening repeatedly.
The problem, of course,
is that it is extremely difficult to understand exactly what's breaking if
a blue screen is starting to happen repeatedly.
It's not uncommon for the information in a blue screen to be different every
time, especially if it's happening like repeatedly when you fire up a specific
program or when you use your machine for too long or you do whatever.
It's really not uncommon
for the information presented in a blue screen to be different.
Not to mention that the information presented in a blue screen was never
in any way intended for people like you and I to understand.
Yeah, there are some tools out there that can typically interpret what might be
in there, but even there, the information that's in the blue screen
may or may not actually have anything to do with the underlying failure.
So what are the things that can cause blue screens?
Well, number one on my list, of course, is hardware.
Again, Windows does a pretty good job of handling most kinds of hardware failures.
It will try to tell you,
it will try to recover softly, but sometimes it just can't.
The very first thing I would think about if it starts to happen regularly is if
you've added any new hardware to your machine.
Drivers, specifically drivers that have
not been provided by Microsoft sometimes are the culprits in these things.
Make sure you're running the most recent
driver for any hardware that you've recently installed.
Number two on my list overheating.
It's probably the number one cause of random crashes overall.
And blue screens are in fact,
one of the ways that those random crashes can manifest.
Your computer is just getting too hot, and something be it the CPU, the Ram,
something else on the motherboard, the hard disk.
Who knows, something fails and Windows
can't handle it, and therefore it blue screens failing disks.
This is an interesting one, because not only are we talking about
the disk itself perhaps having problems communicating to the motherboard,
but it could also be something as simple as a bad sector on the disk.
Typically very benign, annoying at worst.
But in this case, if a bad sector on the disk happens
to have a piece of a file that's used by the operating system
and that particular piece of file is critical and it's misread.
In other words, the information that gets
read from the disk is not the information that was originally written there,
which can happen with a bad sector or a sector that's going bad,
then the operating system may just load some bad code and try to execute it.
The result is often a blue screen. Failing Ram.
Same thing your Ram can overheat, but it can also fail over time.
It's not as common as it once was, but it still remains a possibility.
That's a good opportunity to run things,
like a Ram test, to see if something is going on with your Ram.
And of course, just about any other piece of hardware connected to your system could
directly or indirectly through hardware or software, cause a blue screen.
Speaking of software, let's talk about that.
Certainly, driver updates are one of the places that you can look
for causes, and I say that because drivers operate at such a low level that they have
the greatest opportunity to create blue screens.
Software that is an application or
something that is just part of Windows itself.
It's usually operating in a way that is
protected from being able to create a blue screen.
Your program might crash, but windows won't or your machine won't.
That's not true of drivers.
Drivers need to have full control and along with full control comes full
responsibility for not doing something wrong.
Sometimes other software can do it,
especially if there happened to be bugs in Windows or in that other software.
It's not as common as you might think, but it is a possibility.
And finally, malware.
Poorly written malware,
especially if it manages to get in at an administrative level, can cause this.
Once again, this is one of those things that is not as common as it once was.
Malware today has a vested interest
in continuing to work, Continuing to hide, Continuing to just do whatever it's doing
via crypto mining, sending spam or something else.
In the past, malware because it wasn't being written by professionals,
sometimes had bugs and those bugs could manifest as blue screens.
So when you get a blue screen, like I said,
there's a bunch of information that is presented on the screen.
It will imply that there might be something specific wrong but as I pointed
out the information can often change from one blue screen to the next,
implying that no windows may be catching this at random times.
Even though it is one specific thing that happens to be failing,
we're kind of stuck in most cases by using trial and error diagnoses.
That means doing things like removing all the hardware you can and still run your
machine and see if the problem continues, checking short and making sure you're not
overheating, making sure everything is as up to date as possible.
But always make sure that you are
regularly backing up your machine Because a blue screen can be an indication
of a catastrophic hardware failure either immediately or on the horizon.
And you'll want to make sure that you are not going to lose anything as a result.
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I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Ask Leo.com. Thanks for watching.