What Causes Blue Screens of Death

The blue screen of death — or BSOD — is always an unwelcome sight. BSODs appear when Microsoft Windows encounters a critical error it can’t recover from, requiring a reboot and possibly resulting in lost work.
A blue screen of death is the worst type of error a computer can experience, unlike an application crash, which doesn’t bring down the whole system. A BSOD is the result of low-level software crashing — or faulty hardwar

What Causes Blue Screens of Death

Blue screens are generally caused by problems with your computer’s hardware or issues with its hardware driver software. Standard software shouldn’t be able to cause blue screens — if an application crashes, it will do so without taking the operating system out with it. Blue screens are caused by hardware problems and issues with low-level software running in the Windows kernel.
A blue screen occurs when Windows encounters a “STOP Error.” This critical failure causes Windows to crash and stop working. The only thing Windows can do is stop the computer and restart it. This can lead to data loss, as programs don’t have a chance to save their open data — ideally, programs should continuously save their data so a blue screen of death or other type of error won’t result in data loss.
When a blue screen occurs, Windows automatically creates a “minidump” file that contains information about the crash and saves it to your disk. You can view information about these minidumps to help identify the cause of the blue screen.

Windows Restarts When a BSOD Appears

By default, Windows automatically restarts the computer whenever it encounters a blue screen of death. If your computer is restarting for no apparent reason, it’s probably blue-screening