The Blue Screen of Death--what is it?

I'm getting some pretty frequent blue screen error messages over a buggy game. I am wondering just how alarmed I should be and whether I am doing anything seriously damaging to my pc.

Is this the equivalent of the old "Fatal Error" message? Or is it as serious as MS makes it sound?

I understand the cause;it's a device driver in conflict with the game. I can stop the problem by shelving the game, so I'm not needing a "fix", just a definition.

Thanks to anyone who can help.

Back in the day, if Windows puked it would default to a nice royal blue screen and lock up tight as a vault. Your only option was to hit the reset button or power down. Needless to say, anything you were working on when such an event occured was long gone.

I got one the other day for the first time in a long while. I suppose I'll have to deal with it too. Did you just do a Windows update? I did, and I suspect that's the cause.

In XP it's supposed to be caused by an old driver or just an older version of an application. Here's a quote from an article I read:

The quickest way to obtain more information on a specific error message is to visit Microsoft's Knowledgebase (http://support.microsoft.com) and enter the error number that you saw on your blue screen, in the format 'STOP 0x000000D1'. You should then be provided with a long list of possible culprits that, at the very least, will give you more ideas on what might have caused the problem and may point to a specific application that's known to cause it.

Here's a link to a pretty good Windows support site: http://aumha.org/

Thanks for the link, Squeek. And yes, dte, the only recourse is a hard reboot.

Mine was a display driver error--I did update the driver in question(along with every other update I could find) but it hasn't actually seemed to make any difference.

Every so many hours of play, the game locks and the blue screen appears, telling me my computer is saving itself from an unknown serious fate and that physical memory is being dumped. I've been onto tech support for the game and it's pretty clear that the driver and the game are petitioning for divorce over irreconcilable differences. I know this is something they test for in the beta process, so normally I would wait for a patch, but it doesn't look at the moment like one is forthcoming.

When I first got into Windows I used to take all their little messages and pop-ups very seriously, but I'm afraid over the years I've gotten less panic-stricken.

I was just wondering how much it actually affects my pc when it locks up like that. If I'm slowly poisoning it with fragmented data or anything.....

Thanks for the input, guys.

Once you fire up again, it's like it never happened. Well, aside from the 2 hours of lost progress since you forgot to save recently...

Yes, and the loot dropped by the End-Boss you just defeated that will never be yours...sigh

Thanks for the reassurance.

There are legion causes but assuming (from what you've said) that you always get the same error from the one game:

- a video driver issue; check for new video drivers or possibly consider rolling back to an older driver
- a game issue that causes a problem with the video driver; wait for patch, possibly try different resolutions and video settings
- a video card fault that look like a driver problem in windows; the most common cause of this is overheating when the video card fan is dodgy...does this game push your system hard?

How old is your windows installation?

WHile we are on the topic, I have a couple questions. My laptop will shut shut off while playing a game even though I am plugged in to an outlet and have fukl battery life. If I prop my laptop on a upside down tray it will last longer before putting out, leading me to believe it is a heating problem, but it also does t when not playing game, but I play games enough it only seemed like it. ANy advice (I cleaned the vents but really can't get inside to clean the guts).

Also, whenever I go in my PC or if my PC slows down I switch the power switch on the power supply. I know its voltage switch, but without a little jingle I'll never be able to remember which is right. ANyone know a jingle to help me remember? Also, does it being on the non-na number hurt the computer? AFter years (actually at well over a decade) of doing this I would like to know for sure and in a way that I can remember.

I don't think you're doing any serious damage, but you may want to defragment after 3 or 4 of these events just to remove any file fragments that may have resulted.

A couple of possible suggestions;

You might try re-installing Direct X. Sometimes a driver will get overwritten with an application specific version that doesn't work and play well with others.

You might also want to make sure that you completely remove your old video drivers before installing new ones. Installing the new drivers over the old ones can cause problems that a clean install fixes.

Also, as an off the cuff question, when your system "hangs up", do you sometimes have an audio element stuck in a replay loop? I only ask because I've had this happen when everything pointed to the Display driver, but it ended up being an audio problem. I reduced the sound acceleration level and my crashes stopped.

Anyhow, best of luck with your problem.

I haven't seen BSOD in quite some time, probably since I installed XP. I'm using Windows 2000 and 2003 at work and have never seen BSOD there either. So I think I have last seen it on Windows Me and 98 like 5 years ago.

@Dhruin
Yes, the game does push the system a bit, but I've had a BSOD less than five minutes into the game. They really seem to me to be the result of your second option--a game issue causing a problem with the driver.

The exact error message is something like nv4_displaydll(my card's driver)caught in infinite loop. I'm not completely discounting the heating problem though, since many times the game will run for hours then start to destabilize and crash.

@Gorath--the windows installation is XP service pak 2 regularly updated, but I've been leaving it to the auto-updater so I do need to check and make sure it's completely up to date.(It's a one year old Dell, P4 3.8g, 2gb ram, nvidia7900GTX card)

@Cleric
DirectX is one thing I haven't checked. I think it's 9. something. Is DX10 fairly stable? It seems I've heard something about it being buggy, though maybe that's just with Vista.
Yes, I do have an audio element happening. Tech Support for the game told me to go into dxdiag and adjust hardware acceleration to "basic" and for a few brief hours I thought it was Teh Fix. Alas, at a really inconvenient moment the BSOD rose from it's grave. I am considering completely disabling it.(Hardware acceleration, not my pc , though if there had been a blunt instrument to hand...)

Really, I'm fairly convinced the issue is the game--I've played everything from HoMM5 to NWN2 without a single problem. With this game(it's an expansion, btw--the original game had the same issues for many people til it was patched) I not only have the CTD's, but also many really interesting graphical oddities, like individual tiles turning into transecting bands that start at your characters foot or the top of a landscape feature and crisscross the screen(hard to describe but very dramatic), intermittent flickering(as if the game is lit by a power source about to blow out in the wind) and what I whimsically refer to as The Big Dissolve--where the game resembles one of those B sci-fi action movies where the hero's band has fled an exploding planet and it's being spattered across the galaxy in slow-moving but colorful pieces. I love it when the Tech Support guys tell me to update my drivers.

Anyway, thanks for all the helpful input. I mainly wanted to know if I was inadvertently destroying my computer. I am just going to have to pray that the game has not been abandoned and will be patched...and move on.


@roqua
I wish I could help you, man. Whatever you're describing confused the hell out of me, but it sounds like it sucks.

Like the guys from various tech supports are always saying: defragment your harddrive*wink* if that does not work you should put on your red shoes, click your heels together three times and then say, "There is no place like home" - that usually helps!

The BSOD occurs when Windows encounters a "system error", which is a kind of internal error that it cannot recover from. This is somewhat different, and more serious, than normal crashes (you know, the ones where windows pops up a message telling you that a program has crashes, and whether or not you want to send an error report to Microsoft etc..). Sometimes BSOD is the result of a malfunction of your physical hardware (for example a bad area in one of your RAM blocks or an error with your hard drive), but it can also occur because of a software error in a driver, which is less serious of course You say that your crash is related to your graphics driver, so I wouldn't be overly concerned about having a physical malfunction. If your BSOD only happens with a specific game it is most likely because that particular game actually has a bug in the way it communicates to DirectX through the driver.. perhaps it's sending illegal arguments to a specific DirectX command. Now, this sort of "user error" (here the game devs are the users) should not bring Windows down with a BSOD - it should at most crash the game. So your problem is most likely that the graphics driver developers actually also have a bug in *their* code that doesn't handle the illegal arguments in a graceful way And since the graphics driver is a program that runs in a special mode where it has direct access to the actual hardware such errors can actually result in BSOD. Actually, when a new release of a graphics driver is sent out by nVidia or ATI it will not only contain optimizations to make the card run faster on an overall basis - it will also often contain many small fixes and work-arounds for *specific* existing games that currently crash because they have a bug...

So, if a certain game keeps crashing I would try updating the game, then the graphics driver - and if nothing helps I would accept that I cannot play that game just now. I would recommend *against* turning down the lever of hardware accelleration in the DirectX control panel, since that will affect *all* your games!

Regarding DirectX 10 - that only works on Vista, there is no XP version and they'll never make one. So if you're using XP you're stuck with DX9

Ok let's face it... who here cares for the BSOD (apart from Magerette)? The question on all our minds is: What super-secret game is this that she is so reluctant to tell the name of this particular game? Bet it's Strip Power or something like that...

oh yeah...

*wink*

I will never forget Gates' Blue Screen of Death:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgriTO8UHvs

@ Kaspar
Thanks for the insight. That's really what I was trying to ask for. It's hard to know what will actually help until you have at least a rudimentary idea of what the @#$& is going on.

Ionstormsucks said:

Ok let's face it... who here cares for the BSOD (apart from Magerette)? The question on all our minds is: What super-secret game is this that she is so reluctant to tell the name of this particular game? Bet it's Strip Power or something like that...

oh yeah...

*wink*

Click to expand...

That's it, ISS- thanks to you, my secret is now shamelessly plastered across the internet--and I didn't want my grandchildren to know **hangs head**

Actually, it is the x-pack for a certain action rpg for which I have a known addiction. I have noticed an underwhelming level of enthusiasm for the game & genre here, so I it's almost the same thing .

nameless hero said:

I will never forget Gates' Blue Screen of Death:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgriTO8UHvs

Click to expand...

Not seen that one before!

God the old 'blue screen of death,' thanks for the memories. Hey this is not good imho. No one can say for sure that it is not anything to worry about. It all depends. If you are only getting it with a particular game then maybe it's alright but frankly I have had lost data, all kinds of other problems and even a hd failure preceded by the infamous 'bsod.' What sort of tools do you have to keep your installation ship-shape?

I recommend this one:

http://www.iobit.com/AdvancedWindowsCarePersonal/download.htm

magerette said:

That's it, ISS- thanks to you, my secret is now shamelessly plastered across the internet--and I didn't want my grandchildren to know **hangs head**

Click to expand...

Safe to say I am extremly disappointed - I thought I had finally found someone to play online strip poker with me... meh

Actually, it is the x-pack for a certain action rpg for which I have a known addiction. I have noticed an underwhelming level of enthusiasm for the game & genre here, so I it's almost the same thing .

Spoiler: Hint

Kallixenia the Liche Queen is featured prominently. Also many, many satyrs

Click to expand...

Hey, I'm a big fan of the Lychee Queen... always wondered where that strange fruit comes from anyway...

Looks interesting, ffbj. I'll check it out, but it really is the game. I never even knew that a blue screen error existed til I installed it. Never had one anywhere else, never had one reference anything but the display driver error.

I've laid the game aside as I frankly am tired of trying ten different fixes, updates, downloads and system tweaks every day to get it to run--what did ISS say?

..defragment your harddrive*wink* if that does not work you should put on your red shoes, click your heels together three times and then say, "There is no place like home" - that usually helps!

Click to expand...

There are other games.

Word to the wise: I wouldn't buy the Titan Quest expansion just yet, especially if you have an nvidia card. The 8800 cards apparently also have this issue.