What is going on here? This happened twice in the past hour. I have Windows Defender for protection, nothing else.No Spybot which I used to have, no Ad Blocker. I read that you don’t need them, that Windows Defender was enough
That is not an informative error message. Try running a utility like this to display the actual error code (unless it already says what it is, e.g. DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_OR_EQUAL or HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED or whatever)
You can also try rebooting into Safe Mode and running that way for a few hours. That can help narrow down the list of suspects.
OP, you might try looking at the Event Log:
It will have lots of error messages in the log–most of them irrelevant. So guess at the times the problem is occurring and be sure to look at the log right after the problem occurs. You won’t understand lots of the messages so Google them.
That error is a Blue Screen of Death, but with Windows 10’s “friendly” face.
Do what PastTense said and check Event Viewer. You want to look in System event logs, and find an error that refers to a “bugcheck” (the VMS and Windows NT term for a system crash.)
If discovering the source doesn’t work, or the above help doesn’t work try to use a program like Driver Booster or similar and update drivers system wide. Over the years I’ve noticed that unknown shutdowns and failures were due to NIC/WiFi+Bluetooth module drivers and display drivers having glitches under certain conditions. Updating all drivers is good practice anyhow. Check your resource usage in task manager and see if a program is using a lot of CPU time or RAM. Especially if you find an error message with “IRQ” in it’s output. Update that program or remove it if not necessary to see if anything changes. Best of luck!
I’ve occasionally gone for weeks without a Blue Screen, but have had two just in the last two days. Highly annoying. I pursued Event Viewer just now and, after several wasted clicks, found a list of Errors and Warnings. I get several Errors and dozens of Warnings every day, and wouldn’t be interested enough to find out which caused the Blue Screen except that, apparently even worse than an “Error” is a “Critical”:
Whatevs. 26 seconds AFTER the “Critical” was a “Bug-check Error”:
I need to click ‘Admin’ or whatever to even read that dump, I guess, and lack motivation to do so. It’s the only dump file in Minidump BTW; is that because the folder was hidden/protected until yesterday when, pursuing this thread, I enabled it?
I’m so “all thumbs” on a computer these days, it’s hard for even me to believe that in the 1980’s I was paid big bucks to debug Windows crashes and more! I was fascinated by the weird interplays that provoked bugs. Now FMDINLGAD (“frankly my dear I no longer give a damn”). Anyway, I think I already know what causes the Blue Kiss of Death: Incompetence and Bloat.
It's interesting to compare Windo$e with Unix. I'll guess many Unix users have *never even seen* a Unix kernel panic, while the Micro$oft Blue-Screen has become a ubiquitous metaphor. This [DEL]**[COLOR="Black"]despite**[/DEL][/COLOR] because the Unix kernel was written by 3 or 4 guys, while the Windo$e "kernel" was created by an army larger than the entire militaries of some nation-states.
It’s very rare that a BSoD is caused by windows itself. The culprit is almost always a third party driver or a hardware problem.
Depends what kind of hacking you are doing but BSD, Linux, and so on either come already set up to, or are easy to configure to, save a crash dump to disk so that you can do a post-mortem analysis (just like windows). The advantage is that the crash screen is (generally!) pretty informative, printing out the precise error message, stack backtrace, and stuff like that. Recent versions of Mac OS are no better than Windows, saying something like “you need to restart your computer” - on second thought, maybe that is not too bad, because if the user does not know how to debug a core dump then he or she is not going to benefit from a Blue Screen full of spam like function calls and the contents of machine registers.
I am not sure that Windows machines still crash like clockwork like they used to, but hardware/driver issues can definitely still do it.
“Bugcheck” is the same term used by OpenVMS (and those are known to run for decades without crashing); it’s not fair to scoff at Windows simply because they use that word.
Back to the OP, identifying the “bugcheck” will help as suggested; here is one list
Maybe I should start a Mundane Pointless thread about the four (4) bugs/deficiencies conspiring together to cause a kernel crash!
But the last Unix crash I remember didn’t even cause a “panic”; it had the form:
… Entry for Bus Error Interrupt:
… Process Bus Error
… RET_from_Interrupt // cause another Bus Error!
The only time I’ve ever had that message was when
- I had a virtual drive active.
- A program on my physical drive had a file open on the virtual drive.
- I closed down the virtual drive while the file was still open.
they use that word because the chief architect of Windows NT (Dave Cutler) came from the VMS team at DEC.
My point was that people are still far to quick to go “hurr durr LOL M$ windoze sux amirite?” when the stuff that typically takes Windows down is out of Microsoft’s control. When Vista gained such a bad rep early in its existence, you know who was the cause of many/most blue-screen crashes? nvidia.
anything mucking around in kernel space (which means most hardware drivers) can take a system down. OSes are meant to halt when something goes bad in kernel space otherwise the faulting process can do immense damage. Would you want your filesystem driver to fault and then go corrupt your entire disk, or would you rather the OS halt everything before damage occurs?
Heh, be a Unix admin for awhile, and you’ll see your share of them. Unix/Linux is pretty awesome, but you can make it crash, too.
However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of my laptops kernel panic unless it was caused by a hardware issue.
It occasionally happens that a Windows Update causes problems and that uninstalling recent updates will fix the problem.
IIRC if you stick with F/OSS drivers for everything, they’ll be more stable since they prioritize that over performance. I’ve seen the nvidia proprietary driver fuck things up good here and there.
Well, we’re getting pretty far afield, but that’s generally true. I’ve still seen panics caused by an app just going nuts and doing things like attempting to hog all the I/O (usually has to be several different ones at once), combined with a less than optimal sysctl configuration.
While we’re so far afield, my favorite Unix signal is SIGBUS. It’s supposed to mean that the memory segment you tried to access is no longer present on the system. It’s usually really a programming error, but in the era of virtual machines that are overbooked on ram, it really might not be able to get that address anymore.
This. With all the issues Windows 10 is having with updates, this is what I would recommend as a first course of action for any new repeated blue screen errors. See if uninstalling the most recent update fixes the problem.
Oh, and Windows Defender doesn’t do ad blocking. Get an adblocker for your browser. Block all sites by default. If you feel you need to support a site, and you can’t or don’t want to support them in other ways, you can enable ads on that site.
Ads run third party code that constantly changes. It’s just good computer hygiene to block them by default.