The blue screen of death, also known as the blue screen of doom or simply blue screen, is one of the most notorious error messages in Windows based operating systems. To fix blue screen errors, you can safely assume that there’s something going seriously wrong in your operating system. Unfortunately for us, and even the highest trained computer technicians, fixing the blue screen of death isn’t always as simple as we’d like it to be – and it can take an obscure amount of PC knowledge to get to the root of the problem.

The diversity of reasons for the blue screen of death is down to the fact that it can be thrown by software errors, hardware errors or even a shortage of power. There are a number of stages of troubleshooting required to fix blue screen errors, and the first should be to ensure that your hardware is suitable for the performance that you’re trying to drag out of a system.

For example, if the power supply unit voltage doesn’t match up to the mains supply, you’re likely to have all kinds of power problems where you’ll be lucky to get too fat on your desktop PC without receiving blue screens of death where the system simply can’t run on the power that is being fed to it. These problems may arrive suddenly after the installation of additional hardware, or other power consuming devices. It can be quite infuriating seeing as your operating system could be technically fine and 100% clean of software related errors.

On other occasion, the software installed on Windows may be exactly what’s causing the blue screen errors. To fix blue screen problems along these lines, you will need to examine the context of the error and the application that you are trying to run when it gets triggered. Is there any similarity to programs that you’ve recently installed? Is it possible that other applications could be interfering?

You might even find that uninstalling one program has affected the working conditions of another. To fix blue screens here, we’d routinely look at the Windows registry and run a free scanning utility to try and pick up on any errors that might have been caused as the result of a knock on installation.

The Windows registry houses all the application variables and driver libraries for our Windows operating system, so if these entries become corrupt, it can cause rather sudden and critical system failures that will result in the blue screen of death in the majority of cases. Fix blue screens like these by keeping your registry updated with regular scans to root out any problems before they turn in to blue screen issues.

To fix blue screens, you should also strive to ensure that hardware is kept up to date with working device drivers that are compatible with your system. Attempting to use hardware in conjunction with a corrupt device driver is one of the most common causes of the blue screen of death, and it will force the computer to restart.