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Blue Screen of Death - or
Windows Operating System Errors
category: software
All Windows (NT flavors) users are familiar with the blue screen of death. I was surprised to find it listed as a technical term at www.searchwin2000.com, a computer geek website. No one is immune from its dreadful appearance. And no one seems to know exactly when or why it will appear.
The one reliable thing about the blue screen of death, affectionately known as b-sod, is that it arrives at the worst possible moment. You’ve been working like a dog on something, you’re in the middle of a save or compile, and the damn machine locks up. According to one explanation, "The blue screen may include some hexadecimal values from a core dump that may help determine what caused the crash." And what is a core dump, you might ask. A core dump is a replication of what is contained in RAM, random access memory, at a given moment. A core dump might hint at what application or combination of applications brought forth the Blue Screen of Death, but what good will that you do? Knowing what caused B-SOD will not prevent it from happening again.
The one possibly sensible rule to make B-SOD less lethal is to backup key files more frequently, which we all know we should do anyway. Does B-SOD fear make us backup more often? Only among the crowd who always floss and eat three servings of leafy, green vegetables every day. Save more frequently? Yeah, that's more like it. What about new startup disks when you change some hardware? So, you've got new startup disks, so what? Let's face it, if you did get in there you wouldn't know what to do. Well, now what?
Just reboot and see what happens. Computer advice for dummies? No, "just reboot" is sound, timesaving, and in some cases disaster-prevention advice for anyone. In fact, when anything really weird happens, it's the computer savvy users who tend to get into the most trouble and waste the most time. Sophisticated fixes like reallocating virtual memory, tweaking the registry, or altering some application's .ini file or other parameters are seldom necessary and are always dangerous. On the other hand, don't just give up in despair.
There is room between camo and flowers; if your system is stable (recently problem free), and you haven't just added hardware or software, 99 percent of all weird stuff, including B-SOD, will correct itself when you reboot. Rebooting initializes everything, and drags in fresh copies of system software from your hard drive into memory. Nowadays, with power management and an up-to-date operating system, you can typically go for weeks without rebooting, so when the unexplainable happens, don't give it a second thought. Just drop that puppy and cross your fingers. Hit the reset key, if you have one, and if you don't, just power off and give it 10 seconds or so to reset itself. You will probably be right back in business.
If your system won't reboot, then boot off the install CD and do a repair pass. A repair pass can bring you back from death's door. No kidding.
She said on 05.20.05 @ 01:13 PM CST
