Blue Screen of Death

The Blue Screen of Death (also called BSoD, Blue Screen, or bluescreen), known officially as a Stop Error or a bug check, is the error screen displayed by the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems upon encountering a critical error, of a non-recoverable nature, that causes the system to crash. The term is named after the color of the screen generated by the error. In UNIX-based operating systems, a similar term is kernel panic.

Stop errors are usually hardware or driver related, causing the computer to stop responding in order to prevent damage to the hardware, whereupon, in the latest versions of Windows, the screen presents information for diagnostic purposes that was collected as the operating system performed a bug check.

Details

If configured to do so, the computer will perform a "core dump" and save all data in memory in raw form to a disk file (known as a "dump file") for later retrieval, to assist in the analysis by an expert technician of the causes of the error.

Blue screens are typically caused by software errors in device drivers: in NT-based Windows systems by poorly-written device drivers, and in the Windows 9x family of operating systems by incompatible DLL driver files or bugs in the software kernel of the operating system. They can also be caused by physical hardware faults, such as faulty RAM memory or power supplies, overheating of components, or hardware which is run beyond its specification limits ("overclocking").