Have you ever seen the Blue Screen of Death on your computer?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I did, just recently, in fact.

So, my son took the computer to a maven who declared the hard drive as corrupted. Revelation.

While it was in the computer savant’s hands, I called Tech support. Spoke to a guy in India, who goes by the name of Neo. Honest. :slight_smile:

“You took that name from The Matrix,” I said.
“Whatever,” he replied, nonchalantly.

Anyway, I told him my tale of woe, and he assured me it would be no problem getting my system up and running again. He even gave me a Case Number and a phone number (that, presumably, was better than the regular tech support number).

So my computer comes back and I dialed the number Neo gave me.

After the usual automated-answering bullshit, the Tech Support guy comes on. An American!! Even better he was friendly, competent, and just a helluva nice guy. . He was so comforting, so laid back, he even calmed my wife down (who gets crazy when I’m talking to tech support people).

Anyway, he talks me through it, and in the process, it comes time to install Symantec Antivirus, which originally came with the system. I told him I didn’t want it. He said, you’re right. All of us tech types back herehave two programs for spyware and viruses: Microsoft AntiSpyware and AVG. They’re both free.

Any of you folks can find the sites for the software he recommended (if you’re so inclined). If you can’t, say so and I’ll toss in the links in another post. I don’t know for a fact that AVG is free. I was in too much of a hurry to screw around so I bought the two year deal. The other one’s a Beta and it is free.

So the message is: if you’ve got a fairly new system and get the Blue Screen of Death, don’t go nuts. The problem is not hard to overcome. Even a decently talented tech type in your area can probably get you through it. And if you don’t mess with reformatting C:, you probably won’t need to insert any CDs whatsoever.

It might have taken 20 minutes before my system was back like it was when I bought it last May - and yes, with a lot of data lost, but what the hell.

2

IT person here. I am not sure if I caught all of your actual questions. Blue Screens are much less common than they once were because XP is pretty stable but they still happen to many of us. It used to be an almost daily occurence with the older Windows versions.

AVG is a very good anti-virus package and it is truly free. I ditched Norton for it on my computer because I just like it better.

There are a bunch of antispyware packages that are good. Two are Spybot Search and Destroy and Spywareblaster. I think both of those are free.

Go to www.download.com and read the reviews in the spyware section. MS ASW is beta so you can’t make any promises.

3

Oh my, I haven’t seen the BSOD for at least two years, since I’ve been using WinXP.
Used to hate seeing it though, back in the bad old days.

4

You’re recommendations are spot on, Shagnasty (as they always are). I just wanted to share a nice thing with the people in GQ who’ve helped me so much with my computer problems, and to pass along the comforting news to non-nerds that the Blue Screen isn’t necessarily a catastrophe.

5

They’ve become quite rare since the arrival of Windows XP, but I’ve still seen a few on my computers. One was caused by a conflict between my firewall and antivirus software, another by some sound driver issue. I’ve also seen a few on airport terminal screens and even ATMs… scary thought there.

The thing about BSODs is that they only appear when the system encounters an error it can’t handle. Since the system itself doesn’t know what’s wrong, the BSOD it generates is cryptic and contains information most people would consider useless. It’s hard to determine the problem using a BSOD alone, and while one problematic instance may require only 20 minutes of work, BSODs can also be caused by much more serious problems requiring hours of diagnosis or hardware replacements to fix. Basically, the computer is screaming “Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp!” as loudly as it can, but you won’t know what’s wrong until you actually delve in and look around.

6

Well, I haven’t had a Blue Screen of Death for years, being on a Mac now. :smiley:

To be fair, of course, I have had the Rainbow Pinwheel of Death a couple of times, but not as often as I used to get BSODs. I’m not the one to ask on how OSX compares to WXP.

And I don’t think I’ve ever had a crash on either system which wasn’t fixable by a reboot. When my old PC did eventually die, it was from fried I/O ports, with no apparent effect on the innards or software at all.

7

I have had a BSOD just a few times on XP, and it always seems due to some sort of hardware configuration issue. It has always said that it shut down to prevent damage to the device. Rebooting always cleared it up.

Used to get it all the time on W98.

One of the funniest videos I ever saw was Gates doing a demo of some Windows feature (maybe a new version) for some conference and he got the BSOD.

8

When I switched to XP I didn’t have a single BSOD. Until Wednesday, when I tried to install XP on a newly-installed 500 gig SATA drive. For whatever reason XP BSODed at the install phase informing me that my motherboard was “not fully ACPI compliant” (bollocks it isn’t! It’s a brand freakin’ new Asus A8N32-Premium!) I disabled ACPI for the install and then re-enabled it afterwards and it worked fine. (Strangely enough disabling ACPI caused XP to fail to recognize the second core in my Athlon X2; once I re-enabled it the second processor’s driver installed, though my performance viewer still won’t display one window for each core)

Other than that one time though I’d almost forgotten what one looked like.

Generally speaking though I’m tech savvy enough to fix whatever’s wrong myself so I generally don’t worry about them anyway.

9

For those having trouble finding it, the free AVG Personal Edition that was once featured prominently on their main site seems to have vanished.

Presumably to attract more people to the pay versions of AVG, Grisoft moved the site for the free version to a different subdomain. The main site, as far as I can tell, makes absolutely no mention of the free edition. It doesn’t even show up in their product list.

10

I haven’t seen the BSOD since I started using Windows 2000 Pro, four years ago. I don’t know how it manages, but it hasn’t crashed once. I’ve never had to call tech support for anything, though.

11

I’m not sure I understand the OP at all.

Back when I used Windows 98, I used to see the BSOD frequently, at least once or twice a week. Seldom went longer than 48 hours without locking up or BSOD.

But it was never a big problem requiring taking the machine in to a repair tech; just rebooted and started over again.

If it had a corrupted hard drive, I wonder if they were regularily running maintenance programs (defragging, surface checks, etc.) on that drive.

12

OSX has Rainbow Pinwheels of Death? There has got to be a joke in there somewhere.

Well, OSX of course is built on the Unix kernel and WinXP is built on Microsoft’s NT kernel. Both are really pretty stable. I got myself into an infinite BSOD loop a couple weeks ago when I had some hardware-software conflict. I think it happened when I put the computer into hibernate (which the hardware supports) but XP couldn’t get it to work when I booted it up. Couldn’t figure out how to get out of the loop (this thing couldn’t even boot into safe mode) so I just blew the OS away and did a reinstall. I think it’s because I used to have the computer set to use the classic workstation log-in (this was before a different reinstall earlier this year) and it worked just fine in that situation but it can’t handle hibernation in the “modern” family computer type log-in. I haven’t tried it again, as I wonder if I missed a setting in the CMOS but I’m not in the mood to go looking. I’ve just started shutting down my computer instead of letting it hibernate.

13

Since there is no question here, let’s move this.

samclem

14

I remember when we were evaluating using an embedded version of NT. The makers of the embedded version very proudly told us that there is no blue screen of death in their version. It’s a green screen instead! :smack:

Windows 95, 98, and ME are much more vulnerable to the BSOD than NT 4, 2000 (which is really NT 5.0), and XP (which is really NT 5.1). This is due to the way the operating systems are designed. All of the NT versions have what is called the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), which isolates the programs that are running from the actual system hardware. This means that if the program takes a left turn into hyperspace, it usually only kills itself. Without the HAL, a misbehaving program can not only whack itself into smithereens, but it can take other programs and the rest of the OS with it. Of course, this comes with a down side. HAL is what breaks backwards compatibility with older software that wants to have direct access to the hardware.

In Win 98, any misbehaving program could potentially whack out the OS. BSODs were much more common, but 99 percent of them were caused by an application mucking up. When an application goes sour in XP, instead of a BSOD you usually just get the little pop up telling you to report the program crash to microsoft. If you get a BSOD on 2000 or XP it usually means a driver or system level problem, which often isn’t fixed by just a reboot.

15

I get more pinwheels than BSOD to be honest with you. But at least on Mac’s you have a fighting chance at opening a term and killing the process.

I haven’t seen a hardware BSOD since Win2000 (once) and a software BSOD since NT4 (more times than I care to recall).

16

I haven’t seen a BSOD since I stopped using ME.

AVG is pretty good. I’ve got it on the old computer. On the new one I tried Avast and like it enough to keep it, but haven’t got clear enough preferences to convert either way.

When I was a little kid we had a black and white rectangle Macintosh; I was too young to know what model. When that screwed up you got a little dialog box with a bomb. It scared the hell out of me, I have no idea why.

17

No joke. When the computer is fully busy on some program, the cursor turns into a rainbow swirly thing (equivalent to the hourglass cursor in Windows) (the more familiar wristwatch cursor is like the hourglass-and-arrow cursor). Usually, one sees the rainbow pinwheel only very briefly: The not-quite-completely-busy wristwatch is much more common. If the pinwheel sticks around for a while, it usually means something has crashed. Most typically, it’s just an application which has crashed: If this is the case, then the cursor will be a pinwheel when inside of one of that application’s windows, but if you move out of the window, the cursor will return to normal. In this situation, command-option-escape (the Mac equivalent of control-alt-del) will kill the application, and everything else is fine. Occasionally, however, the problem is in some deeper part of the operating system. You might be able to recover without rebooting, but only if you’re tech-savvy, and even then, it’s probably easier to just reboot.

18

I once saw the BSOD on one of those giant animated roadside billboards.

19

I have never seen the BSOD on my PC, but I hand built it and keep it 100% up to date and clean. All Intel Chipset, 2 Gigs of Corsair 400mkz ram. Rock solid but not bleeding edge Video Card. Extra Fans to keep it cool and Temperature Sensors.

At work (IT guy) I have seen a few, especially in engineering were the CAD software stresses the Dell Workstations to the max.
I keep my Dell at work up to date and I haven’t had a BSOD on it either.

Jim

20

I used to know the registry key that made that change. I changed all my systems to Purple background with Yellow text. I tended to BSOD alot, but it was mainly because my system was used to test new hardware that would come in before installing it in the users system. I had a million different drivers, and software applications on the system, and they didn’t always get along. Every couple of months I would reload, and start fresh.

There is also a registry key you can set to force a BSOD. Once you set the key then pressing IIRC CTRL+SCROLL LOCK will cause it to BSOD. Used for troubleshooting. I don’t know anyone who actually uses it for that. More fun to use it to play practical jokes.

My home system hasn’t had a BSOD ever. Built about 6 months ago. My roommate just had one the other night, but he knows his hard drive is failing.

-Otanx