Once upon a time, back in the days of Windows XP, we were plagued with the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death or BSOD” and it would always seem to find its way right in the middle of a big final school paper or just before the completion of that business report you’ve been working on all weekend. When this happens, the first thing you’d do is to drop to your knees and pray you can find someone skilled enough to revive your computer and retrieve the quite possibly “corrupted” files.

Thankfully, those times have changed. With the advent of the new generation of operating systems that improved on the flaws and limitations of what is considered to be obsolete operating systems, you are more armed to tackle the dreaded window crashes.

The first step to resolving the issue is to determine the cause of the crash. But how do you do that? We’ll explore several methods to help you find out why your computer crashed. From checking error logs to running diagnostic tools, we’ll walk you through the steps to diagnose and troubleshoot common Windows crashing issues.

In Windows 10, the Blue Screen looks the same as in Windows 8/8.1. It’s that screen with the frown emoticon and message, “Your PC ran into a problem . . .” This screen appears more friendly than the original Blue Screens, but a truly friendly screen would tell you what caused the problem and how to fix it; something that would not be difficult since most BSODs are caused by misbehaved third party drivers that are often easily identified by the MS Windows debugger.

In a full system crash, the operating system has concluded that something has gone so wrong (such as memory corruption) that continued operation could cause serious or catastrophic results. Therefore, the operating system attempts to shut down as cleanly as possible – saving system state information in the process – then restarts (if set to do so) as a refreshed environment and with debug information ready to be analyzed.

With time, regular system freezes and blue-screens often point to underlying hardware problems. If there is a hardware problem, there may be nothing you can do about it beyond replacing or fixing the hardware itself.

Here is a quick tool to try if you feel confident to dig in and investigate a little about system failures.

Windows Reliability Monitor

The Microsoft Windows Reliability Monitor is a user-friendly feature found in Microsoft Windows that allows you to view recent system and application crashes. As you can see, each day is broken down into columns. When a column is clicked, additional details appear about that particular date. Critical events are typically what you’re really looking for here, but the other information can be useful as well.

Third Party Tools

There are plenty of places to turn to for help with BSODs, a few of which are listed below. For example, ConfigSafe tells you what drivers have changed and Autoruns tells you what Windows Autorun settings have changed. BlueScreenView scans all your minidump files created during ‘blue screen of death’ crashes, and displays details of the driver or module that possibly caused the crash. These tools help nail the culprit in a system failure.

These are just some of the tips and tricks that you can use to help find out what caused your computer to crash. Afraid to dig in? Let us help you get your computer back to perfect performance. Contact us today!