When do you get Blue Screen of Death?

[sawyen]

Just compiling some information, when do we get blue screen of death?

[demonwolf]

When something is missing from your boot files or they are corrupted you get BSOD on bootup followed by a restart. Just had this problem on my dads computer.
With my own experience some games gave me BSOD when I was overclocked to an unstable setting. Typically some merror addressing errror in the BSOD followed by reboot or a freeze.

[RoGuE|SaBeR]

Bad RAM

Dodgy PSU (Sometimes)

Corrupt Hard Drives

Overclocking (unstable leading to incorrect information being passed around)

[autopilot]

I have not seen bsod for well over a year, usually was a bad driver. Is it just me, or are they much less common these days?

[RoGuE|SaBeR]

Since the days of 95 and 98 have been and gone - most definately

Fact that XP was largely based on NT helped the BSOD situation a fair bit I'd say.

[sawyen]

Bad RAM

Dodgy PSU (Sometimes)

Corrupt Hard Drives

Overclocking (unstable leading to incorrect information being passed around)

Mostly what I was thinking..

Any other possible reasons?

[autopilot]

Loads of reason's for the blue screen of death. But basically it's when the windows kernal can't recover from a serious error. There are two main BSOD's - a Stop Error and a gerneral protection fault. They are usually caused by drivers that give an unhandled exception or tries to perform an illegal oparation. I think one of the reasons is we see less of the BSOD is due to the automatic restart option in XP thats on by default. After i turned this of i used to get more BSOD's, but ultimately the message is usually completely unhelpful and you have to reboot anyway.

[dangel]

Any time i plug a USB device into my machine post-boot There's a bug in one of my USB drivers which means the stack gets corrupted. The new driver model for Vista will wax that problem - gotta hate bad drivers, they're the biggest problem in windows for me

[Lee H]

I've not had a BSOD since I've moved to the Nforce4 platform back in December last year

[Wyoming]

Any time i plug a USB device into my machine post-boot There's a bug in one of my USB drivers which means the stack gets corrupted. The new driver model for Vista will wax that problem - gotta hate bad drivers, they're the biggest problem in windows for me

I have the same problem
That is due to some dodgy Xbox joypad drivers, also had trouble when running multiple applications, individually they work fine though.

[Reaps]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_screen_of_death

Gotta love wikipedia

[Ferral]

I got one the other day after copying a few documents from CD onto my hard disk, a few seconds later BSOD.

For me I think my supply is on its way out, been getting a few power cuts the past few weeks and its literally been off for a few secs and then back on, think its caused some sort of surge and damage has been caused unfortunately. Thankfully everything else inside is just fine.

When it happened the other day it happend that quick off / on my PC still had juice in it and the green light just sat there and nothing worked, I had to unplug the power cable from the back for a few mins and then back in to get me up and running again.

That was one of the first times I have ever had BSOD on XP, last time was when I installed an Nvidia driver that was faulty last year (driver got pulled as it was happening to loads of people if my mind serves me right)

[zulander]

Security software clashing - not on my machine i hasten to add, my mate installed some stuff from NTL but he left some Mcafee Internet Security software on his machine and they were throwing up Blue screens untill he got them off his system

[dangel]

I have the same problem
That is due to some dodgy Xbox joypad drivers, also had trouble when running multiple applications, individually they work fine though.

Workaround for me is to plug in the usb key before booting, that way the stack allocation is correct.. Really, MS are often at the mercy of bad programmers

[kempez]

When I go 5Mhz too far