P
icture this: It’s late at night
and you’re sitting at your
computer playing Battlefi eld
2 , when suddenly, Windows freezes!
Your game is gone, and you fi nd a
blue screen chock-full o’ gibberish
staring back at you. Windows is dead,
Jim—at least until you reboot your rig.
You have no choice but to sigh, shake
your fi st at Bill Gates, and angrily
push the reset button. You’ve just
been visited by the ghost of windows
crashed: The blue screen of death.Also known as the BSoD, the
blue screen appears when core
Windows components encounter
a serious error—usually a crash or
a lockup. The blue screen is actu-
ally a Windows “stop” screen, and
it’s designed to do two things: tell
you what caused the error and calm
your nerves, which explains the
use of the color blue (studies show
blue reduces stress). Blue screens
are notoriously diffi cult to deci-
pher—there are only a few differenttypes of blue screen, but the same
error message can indicate several
different types of problem. Luckily,
all the information you need to fi g-
ure out the cause of your woes is
right there in front of you in blue and
white—and that’s where we come in.
Flip the page to learn how to
decrypt the most common errors, so
you can get to the root of the prob-
lems causing your blue screen blues.A Blue Screen of Death is like an encrypted message from
your computer telling you there’s a problem. We’re going to
help you make sense of the gobbledygook so you can fix
whatever’s ailing your PC!
42 MA XIMUMPC SEPTEMBER 2006
crash
course
BY PAUL LILLY