The Windows Vista Blue Screen Crash

One of the biggest complaints about Microsoft's Visa seems to be the prevalence of fatal driver errors resulting in the "Blue Screen of Death'. These STOP Errors, as Microsoft calls them, are irrecoverable and grind the computer to a halt. The errors are almost always caused by a driver conflict or hardware incompatibility (even in a few that have passed testing, apparently) and normally takes this format: 0x000000??, where the two ??' are the two most relevant digits. For example: 0x0000008E is an error caused by faulty memory or an attempt to write to nonexistent memory, even in the Windows paging file. Generally replacing faulty RAM or updating to the latest hardware drivers can remedy this situation, but not always.

The top 3 causes of Blue Screen errors in Vista

Faulty RAM - For whatever reason (maybe because it uses more than any other OS), Windows Vista is very sensitive to bad RAM sticks. A small bad patch that Linux or XP would run (seemingly) fine with will cause Vista to bomb to a STOP error fairly quickly. A couple of quick ways to check this include swapping out a stick of memory with another one or running memtest86 for a few hours. If you don't have a spare RAM stick but have two sticks installed, you can try just removing one and seeing if the error pops up again. It's fairly easy, however, to boot from your Vista install disk and run the memory checker. If that's not an option you can burn an Ubuntu livecd and choose memtest86 from the menu.

Video cards/drivers - Probably the number one cause of the blue screen, either the drivers aren't compatible, they're poorly written, or the hardware itself isn't Vista compatible. Upgrading to the latest drivers can sometimes remedy this (on the other hand, it's been known to cause it too) but the best bet is a completely different video card. You've probably wanted one that supports the new DirectX 10, anyway.

Virtual CD drives - VirtualCloneCD and several others can cause this on some systems. No specific on it, but reading the various crash dumps has pointed to it a rather large number of times. Same goes for a lot of older CD/DVD burning software. There's a good number of resources on the web to help you troubleshoot these 'blue screens of death' if you should run into them and the cause is difficult to track down. Hopefully, as hardware support in Vista improves and older hardware is phased out, these will no longer be nearly as common.