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Diagnosing A Blue Screen Crash In Windows 7

Blue Screen Crash Error

No one likes the ‘Blue Screen of Death’. This is a prelude to a system crash that you cannot stop, and will have to helplessly watch happen. When asked how to fix Blue Screen Windows 7 users usually do not have a clue. They only know they want the problem taken care of, and maybe to get back all of the unsaved data.

The bitter truth is; there is no way you are encountering a Blue Screen error and keeping all your data. Unless it was saved beforehand, you will probably lose it. The Blue Screen error is rightly considered the worst error a computer can cough up. This is far more potent than a simple application crash, because it brings down the whole system and forces it to restart.

It is usually low-level software crashing, or hardware issues, which cause BSOD. With the latter, it is usually the drivers where the where the issue originates from. And as far as standard applications go, they do not cause blue screens. If these do crash, it would only cause an error within the OS, and not one that resets it. For a blue screen error to occur, you need something to be wrong with low-level software, which run on the Windows Kernel.

This is called a ‘STOP Error’. A critical failure, this causes windows to crash and stop working. It does the only thing it can, which is restart the computer. That is what causes the data loss that many users suffer. The programs do not get the chance to save what the user was working on, and since many of them don’t do this automatically, there’s at least some data that goes missing.

Diagnosing Blue Screen

With each blue screen crash, a ‘minidump’ file gets created. This contains details about the crash, and it gets saved to the hard disk. Checking this out could give you information about the cause of the error.

The Control Panel lets you configure Windows 7 to stop it from automatically restarting when such an error occurs. There are also third party tools, which can show you more detailed information about a BSOD crash. NirSoft’s free BlueScreenView scans all the minidump files to display comprehensive crash information.

As far as how to fix blue screen Windows 7 users can use the above methods to fix the issue, by finding out the applications which crashed while running on the Windows Kernel.