Blue Screen of Death

We all know it by now I suppose. The one we’re all so familiar with, and the one that’s close to heart-stopping. You’re in the middle of some important install, essay, or perhaps a video-conference – then BAM there’s alot of blue all over your screen with some grey text, and then it disappears in a reboot. You lean back to breathe deeply, perhaps shallow – depending on your rate of panic, and you wonder what the hell just happened. Some do know, like me, there was an error of some kind. Logically.

As a small intro to the screen I bet we all know, I’ll go through the pictures ( courtesy of Wikipedia on BSOD’s ) in order of “appearance” :
Windows for Workgroups 3.11
Windows 9x (95,98,Me)
Windows NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista ( Or this )

I don’t know if you remember this one, I know I do, because I laughed my ass off at it when it happened, and Wikipedia was kind enough to remind me! *grins* Bill Gates and the BSOD at the ’98 COMDEX.

The BSOD is pretty famous, and loads of stuff has been written about it – even T-shirts have been made. I remember reading a long essay about why the BSOD ruined a guys life sometime in the late 90′s. I never doubted that guy’s story either. The most recent poetry “I’ve” discovered, thanks to Anna , was a Haiku written by Peter Rothman and “published” here.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Righto, enough fiddling around, enough link-spam, and enough poking.
I generally consider myself above average in computer-enlightenment, but on the odd occasion I’m stumped completely, and on the other it’s because I’ve done something smart before that I can’t remember. That really infuriates me, and suffice to say that doesn’t enhance concentration! So I have to dig, google, and perhaps even wiki a bit. It’s not guaranteed that that helps either…

So this other day I got repeated BSOD’s. My first guess was the gfx-drivers since they were the most recent addition/change, but I couldn’t for the life of me stop the automatic reboot of the machine when the BSOD happened so I could confirm the stupid thing. The minidump was about as useful and helpful as an empty water-balloon every single time as well. So I took on the task of stopping it from instantly rebooting when it went kaplooey as well.
After tons of googling, yahoo’ing, and some wiki’ing I didn’t find it.
From out of nowhere I got a hunch though, and went Win + Break -> Advanced -> Startup & Recover – Settings. There it was; a small v stating that it would ‘Automatically restart’ on System Failure. GAH!

Why the hell is it even on by default? I’ve never had the luxury of a BSOD and reboot fixing the stupid reason, it’s not the most immediately apparent little ‘v’ either, and if you’re a slow ( read: Not superhuman ) reader you wouldn’t know about the minidump either ( and it’s size. Sometimes it doesn’t store enough to contain the actual error that occurred! ).

Bleh, so annoying, but I suspect I’m mostly annoyed with myself for not remembering it immediately.