Blue screen of death

[JoseyWales]

what causes the blue screen

[haklesup]

Many things can cause it. It basically signifies a crash of the operating system. Usually its a memory conflict with data either overwritten or lost or corrupted for something in the OS but can also be caused by hardware failure. There are potentially thousands of causes. You need to read the screen to narrow it down and if it's repetitive, you need to pay attention to what was happening when it came up. These can be difficult to get rid of.

[frhrwa]

windows! one of those quirks of theirs

[CeaSaR]

That's what I like about you frhrwa, straight to the point!

CeaSaR

[frhrwa]

yeah, I know.. but I had it happen so many times, and finally got XP Pro, it slowed the bluescreen problem way down.. only actually once since then, and that was the HP laptop problem.. did the blue screen, rattled off all these numbers, emptied itself, and was worthless after that.. almost 5 years later, HP replaced the laptop.. it happened 2 weeks after I bought the laptop from Fryes.. they wouldn't back it, replace it, or anything, HP basically shined me on for all that time.. I finally found it one day cleaning out, thought about how much I paid for this paperweight, wrote HP's board of directors, and their legal department.. the next day a box arrived with instructions to return it.. about 4 days later I got a brand new HP Laptop, 5 years later... That's what the blue screen of death really means.. ha.. so, needless to say, I DO NOT shop at Fryes, even if they are having a huge FREE giveaway, and I haven't bought any HP product since either.. long story short, blue screen can come from virus's, CMOS dumps, hardware problems, software problems, just plain problems.. and its not nice!..

[haklesup]

Yeah, that 2 week return policy Fry's has for computers, memory and CPUs is a pain in the neck sometimes. Really bad stuff usually fails in that time but sometimes we don't have the time to thoroughly test or get back to the store in time. It made sense when prices for those things dropped weekly but things have stabalized for a while (Buy it today, return it in 3 weeks and buy it back at 20% less). I suppose they think it might get that way again.

The level of customer service by the computer companies seems to have risen. Perhaps now that the market is saturated and sales are slowing, they need to show a high level of service to keep customers. 5 years is an eternity in the computer world, people hold onto their money a lot harder now.

BSOD caused by software misconfiguration can usually be fixed by reinstalling the OS from scratch but if it's caused by a hardware failure, it can be a lot harder to isolate, especially in a laptop. I had it bad up to last year until I disabled a whole bunch of processes I didn't really need using MSCONFIG. I suspect it was one of those auto update things

[frhrwa]

mine came up and said "dumping memory".. and started ripping off numbers.. never ran again, would not read the cd/dvd.. couldn't do anything.. it wiped it out like it took the CMOS chip plumb off the motherboard.. along with a few other things.. at any rate, I have it.. it works now, hard to turn on, and hard to turn off, but it will boot.. just don't use it.. I have a DELL Laptop that I'm completely satified with.. .Never been back in Fry's either.. and never will be back in Fry's..