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Here’s A Sight I Don’t See Often

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A blue screen of death…

surprisebsod

I hadn’t seen one of these in years and then suddenly my work machine (which is a laptop) has started blue-screening every day or so. For those of you who don’t know, a Blue Screen Of Death (or BSOD) is what you get when a low-level subsystem of Windows (the kernel) crashes or more likely a low-level driver (such as a graphics card driver) crashes and is generally associated with hardware problems, which in the case of this laptop is about right!

It certainly provides me with a bit of entertainment each day and reminds me that I need to save my work frequently because I never know when it’s going to happen next. It could be about to happen right now…

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Creator of John's Background Switcher. Scotsman, footballer, photographer, dog owner, risk taker, heart breaker, nice guy. Some of those are lies.

7 Comments Join the Conversation

  1. At the risk of stating the obvious, have you run a virus checker on that PC recently?

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  2. I’m afraid that there is a virus checker running… Ironically I’ve just recovered from another blue screen and this time I got a “BAD_POOL_CALLER” error! Which was nice.

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  3. Reminds me of happy days BSOD-spotting on NT 4.0! I don’t think they’re as attractive as they used to be. What was so bad about a screen full of hex anyway?

    And why haven’t you hooked up another machine via the serial port and debugged the crash using the kernel debugger? 😉

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  4. Actually, try switching off the hardware acceleration on your graphics card — it’s responsible for 50% of BSODs. Your system performance will increase in a highly ironic manner too.

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