Fix Blue Screen of Death
If you’ve got a blue screen of death on your Windows XP or Windows Vista, you probably don’t even care what caused it.
Your pc locks up and you think, “I’ve lost every file since my last backup.” And maybe you wonder when you last performed a backup. (Let’s face it, backing up files is a discipline that slides by the wayside sometimes.)
Your stomach drops and you get a prickly sweat all over your body. The horror of having to redo, or worse being unable to redo, all the work on your computer crashes over you in a nauseating wave.
You can stop your Blue Screens of Death with a simple software. Explore your options here.
To understand how the blue screen fix works, you need to understand the cause. Don’t worry, I don’t speak computer-eeze, just English. And you’ll learn some stuff that will help you avoid panic and recover your pc more easily next time you have an error.
So bear with me.
What causes a blue screen of death (BSOD) error? Simply put: A corrupt Windows registry.
The registry is a database inside the Windows platform that contains the instructions telling your pc how to run Windows and every other piece of installed software and hardware on your system. Microsoft began centralizing these instructional commands in the “registry” in 1995. So every Windows platform since Windows 95 has a registry.
How did your registry get corrupt? Could be an external cause like malware (viruses, worms, spyware, etc) that corrupted drivers or system files. Or it could be the corruption came from an install, uninstall, or update that accidentally damaged registry instructions.
(Sometimes the Windows updates themselves will cause errors in the registry…ask Windows 7 users who got black screens of death following a recent update that invalidated registry keys for lots of people!)
Another common source of registry corruption is faulty or damaged hardware, especially video cards, sound cards, and hard disks. Or if someone logs onto your system as Admin they can corrupt registry data by altering settings wily-nily.
Your first priority when you’ve got to fix blue screen of death should be backing up your data. You need to get into your pc and get copies of everything valuable. If you can boot Windows without getting BSOD, that’s the lucky break for you. Back everything you need up fast.
But if you can’t startup Windows, you’ll have to access your pc through a different platform. The Linux Ubuntu Live CD is a good option. You’ll need an external hard disk to put the Linus CD in, and then start your pc. It will boot up using Linux, rather than Windows, thereby bypassing your damaged registry. This will give you access to your hard drive so you can back up your stuff.
Once you’ve got your valuable files backed up, there’s some good news or some bad news.
It depends on how you’ve got your Windows system set up. If you never messed with the factory settings, you are probably in luck. Because the best and easiest fix for your pc is something called a “system restore.”
If you never changed the setting, your Windows system has been backing up your registry all along. You’ve got backups of your registry that you didn’t even know you had! It’s all good for you, because you can select a date before the blue screen errors began, restore your registry to the condition backed up on that date, and that should solve your problem.
If you’ve been trying to “optimize,” things might be grim. Because you may have turned off the option to create those restore points. Or you might have deleted the old restore points to free up memory. A lot of optimizing sites advise you to do this because the backups can build up and take up a mountain of memory if you don’t thin them out now and then.
Unfortunately, without registry backups, you don’t have a healthy registry to recover through a system restore.
Without restore backups, you’ve got three choices:
- Use a registry cleaner software
- Learn to use the Windows Recovery Console (a DOS mode for repair)
- Pay a computer repair tech
Option one is the easiest one to try. You can download a scan of your registry for free and find out if your blue screen of death error is fixable through the registry cleaner software.
This is what the computer techs at the local repair shop will do to your pc by the way:
- Run an anti-virus
- Restore (if they can)
- Run a registry cleaner.
So save yourself the “minimum charge” that isn’t so “minimum” and do it yourself!
When you get control of your PC again, for heaven’s sake go to CONTROL PANEL -> SYSTEM -> SYSTEM RESTORE. Make sure the option to “Turn off System Restore on all Drives” is NOT checked!
You want to create restore points all along. If you get in another jam, you’ll be able to restore your pc yourself! Don’t worry about memory drain, since you can always delete the oldest ones as time passes.
A good way to avoid blue screen errors, and other registry damage, is to keep an anti-virus software, strong firewall, and a good registry cleaner on your pc. And use them regularly. These three tools are vital if you want long, error-free life for your computer.
Fix Blue Screen of Death by Fixing Your Registry!
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