ihavenoideawhatiamdoing
Rising Star
Hi can I just ask, what does BSOD mean? Lots of people use it in there posts and I have got no idea what it means.
Bsod
- Thread starter ihavenoideawhatiamdoing
- Start date
Blue Screen Of Death
It's what you get when Windows crashes. Look out for any information about why it crashed including an error code.
ubuysa
The BSOD Doctor
Windows (like any decent operating system) is very robust. It can recover internally from a great many problems, sometimes you don't even know that a failure and recovery has happened. The Windows event log contains an entry for every failure and recovery that has happened, that's why you'll often see people asked to check their event log when troubleshooting.
Sometimes the problem is so catastrophic that Windows cannot recover from the problem. It would make problem determination very difficult if Windows just died and left you with a black screen. So Windows has a sort of problem safety net, when a serious problem occurs that Windows cannot recover from it displays a blue screen with a description of the failure.
In Windows 7 this was filled with white text containing a technical description of the system state at the time of the error and, right near the bottom, a Stop Code (that looks something like 0x0000000A) which techies, like what we are, can use to help diagnose the problem.
In Windows 8 and above you still get a blue screen (it's a slightly different shade of blue) with a sad face and a message that something has gone wrong. You do usually also get a description of the problem (that looks something like IRQL-NOT-LESS_OR_EQUAL) which techies like us can use to help diagnose the problem.
In both Windows 7 and Windows 8 there will often be a dump taken (a copy of the contents of memory) to aid problem determination, it can sometimes take a few minutes to write this dump out and you just have to sit and wait whilst it does.
It's called the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD for short) partly because the screen is blue and also because it means your system just died.
Does that help?
Now you know, let's hope you never have a BSOD otherwise you really will have no idea of what you are doing :taz: