Blue Screen of Death Mayhem
Ahhh, the notorious blue screen of death. Conjures up memories of failed project deadlines doesn’t it? Blue screen errors always seem to happen at the most inopportune times. It’s kind of like the modern day, “the dog ate my homework” excuse. Only the dog, in this case, is Microsoft and their unstable operating systems. And this time, it’s the truth. Even good ‘ole Bill Gates himself was not immune to the random and occasional blue screen of death. Watch the following video for an example; you will see that, at one of his most important presentations, Billy boy is assaulted by his now famous, or shall we say “infamous”, blue screen of death. This is pretty funny.
Now if you do a google picture search for “blue screen” and here are a few of the results you might come up with:
Bill Gates flaunting his blue screen invention.
Here some idiot tattoos the BSOD error message on his arm. Probably Bill Gates …lol. Just joking Bill. I mean about the idiot part.
There is wallpaper of the blue screen of death. Click here to download a 1024×768 version with blinking cursor. This would make for a very funny prank with one of your “Dwight Shrute-like” office co-workers. All you have to do is hide the desktop icons and task bar and you’re in business. Or you can get a blue screen of death screensaver here.
Heck, there are even t-shirts made with the blue screen of death error printed on them:
Like it or not the blue screen of death has become a part of our computing culture. Something, unfortunately, most of us have gotten used to. At Geek Teks the BSOD error has become one of the more common issues that people call us about.
So what causes the blue screen to occur and how can we avoid it?
What a popular question! I am glad you asked.
A blue screen of death error can occur on your computer because of several reasons but usually it has to do with hardware failures or driver issues.
- Hardware issues are the most common causes for blue screen errors. Many times the power supply is starting to fail. Sometimes it is the fault of memory beginning to go. Sometimes the culprit is the motherboard or hard drive. A full hardware diagnostics should really be run on the machine in order that the issue can be pinpointed. If you have a PCI diagnostics card, use it. Run memtest against your RAM. Use a manufacturer specific hard drive diagnostic utility against your hard drive to check for errors. Open up your machine to look for blown capacitators on the mobo. Test the power supply with a good power supply tester. These are all things that should be done on a regular basis anyways. So now that Mr. blue screen has forced you into action, you may as well do them yourself or call Geek Teks. We’ll send a technician out to your site right away to do a diagnosis for you and pinpoint the issue.
- If a complete hardware diagnosis is completed with no known failures, the next probable issue might revolve around driver issues. To check, first try first to boot into ‘Safe Mode’ by tapping the F8 key at startup. If the boot process completes and you are able to see the desktop in safe mode, then you probably have some sort of driver issue. Try ’start’>’run’ and then type in ‘msconfig’. When the dialog is displayed, go to the ’startup’ tab. Eliminate everything from startup but your virus and spyware protection. Try restarting in normal mode again. Sometimes certain software, which starts up with your computer, run specific drivers needed for that software to operate. If your computer boots up in normal mode, you know that the culprit was a piece of installed software running at startup. It is best to eliminate every application not necessary at startup and then to go from there, adding applications back to startup on a one by one basis until the culprit is found, if it can be found this way. If it fails, look closely at your blue screen error again. It might tell you which driver is the cause of your problems. Sometimes there are drivers running on your system, started by a system service, that cannot simply be removed by un-checking startup applications in the msconfig dialog. On occasion, video drivers go bad. You would need to boot up into ‘Safe Mode’ with networking to resolve this one. Then you would download the updated driver needed for your specific video card.
This blue screen indicates a problem with the spcmdcon.sys file. If it’s the same file every time, then that suggests a software or driver issue. Google the file in question. Figuring out what that file does, may lead you to the driver in question. If not the software, then it may indicate a problem with the hardware that driver controls.
- Sometimes, the BSOD error occurs quite simply because you have yourself a buggy operating system. To solve the this, either try to stay on top of your windows updates (sometimes solves the problem) or switch to another more stable operating system.
Windows Vista Blue Screens
Well, if I am going to be honest and cover all bases for blue screen of death occurances on your Windows machine, then I have to throw this one in as well. It only applies to Windows Vista machines. If your Windows Vista machine blue screens, and you know it is not any of the above, then it just might be that your Vista operating system is blue screening because it suspects you are a digital thieve, have broken the DRM schema, and have pirated the content you are now attempting to play on your windows or windows connected machine. What a judgemental operating system huh? There is no innocent until proven guilty concept here. Yes, thanks to Hollywood, your PC is now your policeman as well. Watch this video for a more thorough introduction on this topic:
If all else fails, either buy a new system or call the Geek Teks at 877.433.5835. We’ll solve the problem for you quickly and for a reasonable price.
- Kyle
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