Thursday, January 31, 2008

Blue screen errors

Blue screen
The Blue Screen of Death (also known as a stop error, BSoD, bluescreen, or Blue Screen of Doom) is a colloquialism used for the error screen displayed by some operating systems, most notably Microsoft Windows, after encountering a critical system error that can cause the system to shut down to prevent irreversible damage to the system's integrity. It serves to present information for diagnostic purposes that was collected as the operating system issued a bug check.
If so configured, the system will dump all of its memory to a file on disk. Data in memory would then be lost but in some circumstances it could be retrievable from the dump file, a process that must be carried out by a trained PC technician.
According to Microsoft, bluescreens on NT-based Windows systems are usually caused by poorly-written device drivers or malfunctioning hardware. In the Win9x era, incompatible DLLs or bugs in the kernel of the operating system could also cause bluescreens. They can also be caused by physical faults such as faulty memory, power supplies, overheating of computer components, or hardware running beyond its specification limits. Bluescreens have been present in all Windows-based operating systems since Windows 3.1; earlier, OS/2 suffered the Black Screen of Death, and early builds of Windows Vista displayed the Red Screen of Death after a boot loader error.
The term Blue Screen of Death originated during OS/2 pre-release development activities at Lattice Inc, the makers of an early Windows and OS/2 C compiler. During porting of Lattice's other tools, developers encountered the stop screen when NULL pointers were dereferenced either in application code or when unexpectedly passed into system API calls. During reviews of progress and feedback to IBM Austin, Texas, the developers described the stop screen as the Blue Screen of Death to denote the screen and the finality of the experience.[citation needed]

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