BSOD - Blue Screen of Death

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jethro's picture

Sometimes hardware just stops working. Sometimes Windows handles this well, other times it doesn’t. Jude’s PC is rather old, and she has been running Vista on a machine that was not built for it. In the weekend she experienced a blue screen of death that returned every time she logged in within about 5 minutes.

The Blue Screen of Death T-Shirt  After some initial troubleshooting turned nothing up I decided to test the Windows home server restore process. This worked wonderfully well, but the BSOD kept happening. I dug deeper, and then decided to rebuild the machine. First I tried Vista ultimate 64bit. I had this running smoothly, and was installing drivers and hardware apps when BANG – BSOD. The screen shot straight into a restart so no chance to snap a photo of it for research.

I tried a fresh install of Vista Ultimate 32 bit in case it didn’t like the UPS drivers I had just installed. No good either. After more troubleshooting I think the Motherboard has a faulty USB connector and software drivers in the BIOS. There is a patch, but in this case, the MB is just going to get junked.

So she is setup on a laptop for now or she can use the development machine when staff are not here.

Maybe I need to get her one of these t-shirts!