A blue screen of death as seen in Windows XP and Vista.A Blue Screen of Death (also known as a stop error, BSoD or blue screen) is an error screen displayed by certain operating systems, most notably Microsoft Windows, after encountering a critical system error which can cause the system to shut down to prevent damage.
Bluescreens can be caused by poorly written device drivers, a corrupt registry, or an incompatible Dynamic-link library (DLL).
Bluescreens can be caused by physical faults such as faulty memory, mains power supply voltage variance or spikes in conjunction with or magnified by power supply unit voltage rating not matching the mains supply (For example a 220V PSU attached to a 240V mains outlet), the power requirements of the computer exceeding the capacity of the PSU, overheating of components, intermittent power to hard disk drives or other parts, faulty hardware, or hardware running beyond its specification limits. Bluescreens have been present in all Windows-based operating systems since Windows 3.1; OS/2 and MS-DOS suffered the Black Screen of Death, and early builds of Windows Vista displayed the Red Screen of Death after a boot loader error.
The term "Blue Screen of Death" originated during OS/2 pre-release development activities at Lattice Inc, the makers of an early Windows and OS/2 C compiler. During porting of Lattice's other tools, developers encountered the stop screen when NULL pointers were dereferenced either in application code or when unexpectedly passed into system API calls. During reviews of progress and feedback to IBM Austin, the developers described the stop screen as the Blue Screen of Death to denote the screen and the finality of the experience.
Contents [hide]
1 Types of BSoDs
1.1 Windows NT
1.2 ReactOS
1.3 Windows 9x/Me
1.4 Windows CE
1.5 Windows 3.1
1.6 Xbox
1.7 Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
1.8 PlayStation Portable
2 Nintendo DS
3 Display
4 Details of the Blue Screen of Death
5 "Famous" BSoDs, Easter Eggs and others in Popular Media
6 See also
7 References
8 External links
[edit] Types of BSoDs
[edit] Windows NT
A blue screen of death as seen on an Advertising screen in a Chadstone Shopping CentreIn Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista, the blue screen of death occurs when the kernel or a driver running in kernel mode encounters an error from which it cannot recover. This is usually caused by an illegal operation being performed. The only safe action the operating system can take in this situation is to restart the computer. As a result, data may be lost, as users are not given an opportunity to save data that has not yet been saved to the hard drive.
Blue screens are known as "Stop errors" in the Windows Resource Kit documentation. They are referred to as "bug checks" in the Windows Software development kit and Driver development kit documentation.
The text on the error screen contains the code of the error as well as its symbolic name (e.g. "0x0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED") along with four error-dependent values in parentheses that are there to help software engineers fix the problem that occurred. Depending on the error code, it may display the address where the problem occurred, along with the driver which is loaded at that address. Under Windows NT and 2000, the second and third sections of the screen may contain information on all loaded drivers and a stack dump, respectively. The driver information is in three columns; the first lists the base address of the driver, the second lists the driver's creation date (as a Unix timestamp), and the third lists the name of the driver.[1]
By default, Windows will create a memory dump file when a blue screen error occurs. Depending on the OS version, there may be several formats this can be saved in, ranging from a 64 KB "mini dump" to a "complete dump" which is effectively a copy of the entire cont
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