A Brush With Death

Just to prove right now, this is NOT in the wrong section. Now...

I had just encountered the blue screen of death, and, like I'm sure, many other people reacted, my first thought was "Oh ****aki Mushrooms!" without the aki mushrooms of course. So, I did what the screen told me, and restarted the compy in Safe Mode. Realizing I couldn't get on the internet in Safe Mode, I restarted the computer and it started normally as if nothing happened. Now, mind you this is a laptop. So, what the hell? is my current question. Did I just miss death by inches, or is this normal? Has anyone else had this happened to them? Because I have a friend who has the death screen, and he couldn't fix it.

Was this luck, or will death come back for me?

It could be a trojan, so I would strongly recommend that you try and find any suspicious process in your Task Manager and look up the ones that you think are suspicious on Google. After finding the bad process, go on Safe Mode, pull up the Task Manager, and delete it.

usually a serious software/driver error(just reinstall windows and the appropriate drivers)

or a hardware error.

usually when i see a BSOD, I just lower my overclock abit... haven't seen one in forever though.

But that's the thing. I haven't done anything at all since it happened, and it's completely fine. Do I really need to do anything at all?

Originally Posted by LunchboxZU

But that's the thing. I haven't done anything at all since it happened, and it's completely fine. Do I really need to do anything at all?

probably not

Alright, well, now it has happened again. So, I did what I did the previous time, and it worked, sorta. When I opened up the start menu, it froze and I had to restart the computer. So, I'm pretty sure it'll come back again, unless I do something.

So, I'm not really computer savvy, so if someone could tell me how to prevent the BSOD? Pwease and tank chu.

The BSOD never meant "death" for me. Usually it was a software problem, or a driver issue that crashed the computer. I never took it as anything bad, just that there was a problem somewhere, and normally this problem either never returned or was blatantly obvious was the cause was.

However, I got the BSOD frequently on Windows XP, so frequently that I switched to Vista, and now I never get the BSOD. Vista is truly a blessing - compy crashing several times a day was awful. Yeah, I bought Vista - kill me! At least it won't be the BSOD that's killing me!

I wouldn't worry too much about it. The only thing you can do to REALLY prevent it is research the cause and kill the cause. Make sure your computer is up-to-date, and make sure that you're not running Windows XP. seriously, XP is a magnet for the BSOD... it ticks me off so much.

And for the Linux crew who will say I should have switched to Linux: I did use Ubuntu for a few days, but couldn't get the proper display drivers. Even when I did, there were numerous problems, and taming Linux was not what I wanted to do. Everything in Vista just worked. Kind of like buying a mac. Using Ubuntu was NOT like buying a mac. After a few days, I gave up.

I still use Linux for USB drives and stuff, pen drives, etc, when I need a nice, mobile operating system.

No, I wouldn't blame it on Windows XP, I've had it for a long time and I haven't gotten blue screen at all. There are 3 other computers in my house with XP (Two Home computers, One Laptop) and none of them have had any problems with BSOD. Either your computer was crappy, or you got some strange crappy version of XP.

But seriously, if you don't want to get BSOD again, just try to find the main problem and try to fix it. Mostly you get it with a Hardware or Software error. Since you said you weren't that computer savvy, find someone you know who is so they can help you out.

But I haven't gotten a BSOD since I had Windows 98, that thing annoyed me so much when I was smaller and wanted to play my Computer Games.

*Groooan* Now, my laptop can't get anywhere past the loadign screen. (Not with the Windows XP and the blue bars running across, before that* Apparently, it can't start up because a file is corrupted, or missing, or something. Does anyone know how to stop this?

There's something wrong with Windows. I would suspect some sort of malware, if you haven't been tampering with a lot of stuff lately. You can attempt a Repair of Windows using the disk, but that has never worked for me an any situation, but it might help you. If you can open Safe Mode, you could try to fight the problem from there, though that would be difficult without much knowledge and support of Windows' inner workings. Your last option would be to reformat your drive, after backing up your files in Safe Mode or putting your hard drive in slave mode.

GC, I've found XP to be excellent for avoiding the BSOD, I've had it about 3 times in 4 years.

Anyways, the BSOD does not mean instant death, it just means that an error has happened somewhere that's caused your computer to crash. It's not permanent (Well, in most cases, anyways.) and normally goes away, often never to return, after a reboot.


Anyways, if you can't login I'd try a repair install of Windows, just have the Windows CD in your CD-Rom drive on boot-up. It's worked wonders for me in the past.