Windows XP forum: Poll: What was the cause of your last BSOD?

Exactly, Jean. I've never gotten the BSOD on any desktop or laptop I've owned, and I've owned computers for 15+ years, using them every day.

Whenever I've gotten a new PC or laptop, it's not because the equipment failed but because I wanted to upgrade to something faster and more powerful yet more compact.

I won't lie, I have had a few BSODs that I know for sure were a result of software conflicts or inconsistencies. Who's to blame, the software producer or the creators of the operating system? Beats me... Although, since I've started using XP with SP3, I can't ever recall BSOD'ing from a software issue.

I do overclock my rig quite a bit though, and while I'm testing for stability, of course I'm going to get BSODs.. quite a bit actually, but that's totally normal, especially when you're pushing a Q6600 to do 4.0GHz on air + aftermarket HSF ... for the record, I've only ever managed 3.75GHz (it was a B3 stepping); only stable enough to make a few runs of 3DMark06, ORTHOS and OCCT to set some benchmarking scores, but eventually it BSODs...

Besides overclocking, I've had some peripherals that for whatever reason will cause a BSOD with any system I connect it to. I think in someway the circuitry/board, or the data within the hardware in question (something like a usb key or mp3 player) is corrupted.

I think the whole thing about the BSOD is just so inflated and overhyped.. other OSs will hang, freeze and have catastrophic failures.. the BSOD, I think, just freaks people out because one minute you're looking at your desktop, and the next minute you have this bright blue screen with bright, scary old-school font, and I'm sure that sorta extreme transition freaks people out, whereas the screen just hanging or blacking out has less of a signature to it, people can't really call it anything, it's just a standard freeze, so you don't get this sorta infamous legacy with it...

Also my first BSOD on XPSP2. Apparently, Window screens don't like to be shut down before they load completely!

BSOD happened at random. It was a hard drive connection that was just a bit loose.

It was my first windows xp install. I rebooted and windows went into repair mode and the BSOD never came back... I was warned that might happen with my first copy of xp as a new product(it was way before any service packs). I have never had a BSOD since that time, I built the machine myself, and I have built 7 since then and refurbished 3 without a problem. I do check all my connections before I turn the power on and I generally test every part on my demo machine before I install it to make sure it works. I read all I can read on a part off the internet before I purchase a part including the retail page and manufacturers pages as well as reviews and test results from places like toms hardware and read all the instructions before I install. I check for current drivers, for instance I have a xp build that has a agp card, the manufacturer built a current video card build with legacy agp, the only driver that would work was the manufacturers edition, because it was an adaptation to a legacy video bus, great card by the way, and, if you ran the manufacturers driver it worked great... if you ran the designers copy that was made for pci e 2.0 you might have gotten a BSOD .

Could be weak power supply or heat issue maybe cpu fan and heatsink is pluged with dust bunnies .

It was a couple of years back. We were running a 4 year old computer from a well known company (name withheld). When we turned the computer on, it would immediatly (ie within 10 seconds) show a BSOD. you would restart it, and you had to leave it for a few minutes before you could do anything with it.

It turned out the capacitors in the processor were oozing - not healthy

i had a problem with my display dricer. after uninstalling and then i went for a driver update. i got it ok

Since installing 64 bit Vista I've had very few BSOD eppisodes. The recent one was caused by a Nokia software install causing a shut-down problem when it attempted to re-start the PC. The system recovered on powering up again and the software seems to have installed correctly.

One computer I had to run check disk on drive that fixed BSOD error.
One computer had two Ram sticks took out one still error, took out second and replaced with first BSOD fixed (Just replaced the bad RAM stick and no more BSOD)

It was a problem with my memory slot...I changed the sticks around into different slots and the problem went away

Was caused by motherboard going out.

My "like new" (i.e., factory refurbished) Dell Inspiron laptop experienced BSOD failures repeatedly right out of the box. After lengthy discussions with support personnel, reinstallation of virtually all software plus installation of a new CD/DVD drive and a new hard drive, they finally agreed (after about 2 months of trial and mostly error solutions) to let me send the unit back. It came back a week later with a new motherboard, and has worked fine since then.

Broken network card. Literally--I could see the break in one of the printed circuit lines. Pop the card=no BSOD.

With four machines, two of them as old as Win95, I've never had a BSOD that didn't track to a hardware problem.