Also known as BSOD ( the Blue Screen of Death! ) your computer suddenly stops working and displays something that looks like this ( but t probably won't have the ultimate culprit as clearly indicated as in this example ).

By its very nature, because a Blue Screen is so unexpected, it is almost impossible to give general advice on how to proceed. Certainly exercise caution, your computer could be about to die!

Blue Screening can be caused by any of the following:

• Sofware faults - like device drivers accessing forbidden memory
• Hardware faults - e.g. corrupted memory
• Problems during installation - a failed install may lead to a blue screen
• Intermittent errors - seemingly random and for no good reason at all

Like crashes, the Blue Screen of Death occurs when something pretty unexpected happened, something that windows can only handle by either "falling over" in the case of a crash or by forcing the computer to shutdown.

The information on the Blue Screen may be of help, so it's a good idea to write it down, at least the first few lines or so especially the numbers like 0xf00000565 and the uppercase words like IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. What is more, the computer may be able to store away more clues about what caused the problem in a non-human readable form called a "crash-dump". See the section on crashes to check that your computer is setup to save these.