A Blue Screen of Death (also known as a stop error, BSoD, bluescreen, or Blue Screen of Doom)
is an error screen displayed by certain operating systems, most notably
WINDOWS, after encountering a critical system error which can cause the
system to shut down to prevent damage. Bluescreens can also be caused by physical faults such as faulty memory, mains power supply voltage variance or spikes in conjunction with or magnified by power supply unit voltage rating not matching the mains supply (such as a 220V PSU attached to a 240V mains outlet), the power requirements of the computer exceeding the capacity of the PSU, overheating of components, intermittent power to HDDs or other parts, faulty hardware, or hardware running beyond its specification limits. Bluescreens have been present in all Windows-based operating systems since Windows 3.1; early builds of Windows VISTA displayed the Red Screen Of Death after a boot loader error error.
By default, the display is white, lettering on a blue (CGA color 0x01; HTML color #0000AA) background, with information about current memory values and register values. For visually impaired users, Microsoft has added a utility that allows the user to change a setting in SYSTEM.INI that controls the colors that the BSoD code uses to any of the 16 CGA colors. Doing so requires the edit or addition of the "MessageBackColor=X" and "MessageTextColor=X" lines to the [386enh] section of the SYSTEM.INI, where X is a hexadecimal number from 0 to F corresponding with a color in the CGA 16-color palette. Windows 95, 98 and Me use 80x25 text mode. The Windows NT BSoD uses 80x50 text mode. The screen resolution is 720x400. When getting the BSoD, the screen will go black for about a second and any playing audio will start to skip, and then a dark blue screen will come up with white writing. On Windows XP and Vista, it reads as follows:
|
