Blue Screen
The Blue Screen, or Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), or a stop error is an error message displayed when certain operating systems encounter a critical error. This is the most notable thing in Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and has been present in all Windows operating system since Windows 3.1. Earlier beta versions of windows Vista used to display a Red Screen of Death on boot loader error, however, all officially released Windows Vista display the blue screen. Blue screen is usually caused by corrupt Registry, incompatible DLL’s, faulty memory, or badly written device drivers. Blue screen is more commonly encountered In Windows 9x and ME operating system, if you eject a CD or a floppy a little too soon.
In Windows NT and later operating systems, the blue screen is caused when a driver running in kernel mode, or a kernel itself come across an error from which it cannot recover. The code of the error and its symbolic name is displayed as text on the error screen, which can help the software engineers to solve the problem that has occurred. Such an error code also displays the address where the error occurred, as well as the driver loaded at such address. Windows creates a memory dump file when the blue screen occurs, which copies the content of the RAM. This file can be debugged later using a kernel debugger. This is required to know the real cause of the problem, as the blue screen displays very limited information regarding the problem that has occurred, which can be misleading at times.
To obtain the memory dump of the computer in a given stage, one can get windows to display the blue screen manually. Adding a value to the windows registry, and then pressing the scroll lock twice while holding the right control key, will display the blue screen.
When Windows XP encounters blue screen, it saves only a 64k mini dump, and then automatically reboots the computer. As this process happens very quickly, the users see the blue screen only for a split second, or not at all. Users mostly see this as a random reboot, and only the do they come to know that the Windows has recovered from a serious error.
The display of such an error message is white lettering (EGA color 0x0F; HTML color #FFFFFF), on a blue background (EGA color 0x01; HTML color #0000AA), and it contains information regarding current memory values, and register values. Even embedded systems using Windows NT embedded or Windows XP embedded displays blue screen on the devices. You may have encountered such blue screens on internet pay phones, ATM’s or even electronic advertisements, and information displays.
And if you think you are encountering blue screen too often with your operating system, you are not alone. Bill Gates encountered blue screen while unveiling Windows 98 to the world (Watch the video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8363127660275444169&). But the richest man in the world had another PC as standby, and so he could get away with it.
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