The Blue Screen of Death

Blue death.  It’s frightening when it happens.  And sometimes takes hours to figure out why.

A couple of weeks ago I was working on editing a big piece for my affiliates to use with their branded links.  When out of nowhere the computer shut down.

All by itself.  A blue screen popped up saying the computer was going to shut down to protect the hard drive from corruption.

And then nothing.  Black.  Everything gone.

I immediately grabbed the phone and called my best friend who seems to have an answer to just about everything I ever ask.  And she told me -

1. The screen pops up when Windows senses a software, hardware or driver error that could corrupt the data on the computer on operating systems earlier than Vista.  Vista has the Red Screen of Horror.

2. If I reboot the computer it may resolve itself and may not require anything else.  If it happened again or even a third time then I had to take action.

3. When the screen popped up again it would be important to attempt to read the screen in the literally 3 seconds it would appear on the screen before the computer completely shut down.

Yeah . . . RIGHT!

4. If I can remember or write down the error message then I could use those numbers to search for the code online and learn which driver or piece of software was going south for the winter.

5. On the other hand, I might have to check for updates on all drivers for external hardware such as printers or external hard drives, update all software and check for all up dates from Windows, scan for viruses and spyware using two or three programs, defrag, disk clean up, check the volume for errors, fix the errors and attempt recovery of bad sectors.  Sounded like hours of work while the computer was completely unusable.

6. The easy route would be to write down the error and correct it.  The more difficult route is covered in number 5.  Of course even if you do everything it can still happen again.

I love my computer – can’t live without it.  I make my living on a machine that reads letters and numbers using algorithms I can’t begin to understand.  Talk about a loss of control!

But knowing and understanding what to do is just basic business sense.

My solution?  Back up the data and know how to recover it!  It gives you such a piece of mind so that struggling through the correction of the computer becomes just frustrating and not business ending if you lose the whole hard drive.