What to do about Blue Screen of Death?

Yes. Try to duplicate the error, write down what you see on the screen and post it here, then we will see what can be done.

@lilikoi Real helpful.

Depends on the error. Blue screens can be caused by several different things. Could be hardware, could be software. Do you know the exact error? Depending on the error you may not have to do a full recovery.

If it is only one I wouldn’t do anything other then restart the computer. If it starts happening a lot that is when you start to worry. Sometimes they are just random and months apart. Do take note and try to spot a trend.

Right now I wouldn’t worry.

lilikoi Real helpful.

lilikoi’s suggestion to “use Linux” was excellent! Not as good as “Go to the Apple Store, buy one of everything”, but it ought to beat “Duplicate Windows misery, lather, rinse, repeat”.

Mouth to mouth works sometimes.

OMG I cannot believe the moderators censored me for recommending Linux !!!

If you truly want to be rid of the BSOD, that is absolutely the best thing you can do.

And, if you’re going to have to wipe your hard drive anyway, you don’t really have much to lose by doing this. And if they are telling you that you’re going to have to wipe your hard drive, hitting the restart button ain’t gonna cut it. And finally with the little information that you provided about your problem, I – nor anyone else – was able to offer a much better suggestion.

Bah.

buy a mac

Its funny when linux crashes though.. if it does go down on you, its usually catastrophic! I have seen it go down before. But to the originator of the question, please provide more details and we may have better luck assisting you with your situation.

@Georgia_Printco , for the 1,000,000th time, if Mac is the answer, you don’t know what the question was. This guy has a problem, as in maybe not being able to access his data. Telling him to buy a Mac is going to make him feel real good.

Now on to the question – most common cause of BSOD is hard drive corruption. First thing to try is booting to safe mode with command prompt, then type in CHKDSK /R. That will attempt to fix any bad sectors on your disk. If you can boot to your Windows recovery disk, you can get to a command prompt that way, too. If they did what most of them are doing now, give you no recovery disk, just a recovery partition on the hard disk, see if you can boot to that.

Hold down F8 while you power the computer on. That gets you to the boot menu. If you don’t even get that far, send it home to Sony if it’s under warranty, or find some independent technician who works out of a storefront or his house to fix it. Don’t bother with Geek $quad or another big outfit; they’ll rob you blind.

Does it still boot? Will it boot in safe mode? (move data to external here) Have you tried drive diagnostics? (Spinrite, etc..) If it runs in safe mode try virus scans (I like Combofix) A restore to an earlier date may work, or a REPAIR install of xp from your disks will not lose your data or programs. If all fails, formatting and reinstalling xp is likely (assuming no hd failure) @lilikoi ; I use a dual boot xp and Ubuntu on my laptops now; I have not had any probs with linux yet; so far so good!

To avoid any more insanity.

I would do what Sony said. Reformat drive, re install, see where it gets you and hope it is not a bad hard drive. Which is really not that big a deal. A 30 second install of hard drive.

I don’t care what OS you run, Windows, Linux, Mac, Amiga, whatever, a full-on system crash is something you will see, be it with a blue screen or not.

Point is, don’t panic.Just reboot.

Sony Customer Support’s response to perform a full system recovery is a knee-jerk reaction and not of any real help. You risk losing whatever changes you’ve made to the system since the last restore point was made and still might not actually fix the real problem.

So before taking any kind of permanent action, you need to find out what’s wrong.

Note the conditions of your computer prior to BSOD and write them down. See if you can make it happen on purpose. If it’s something you can consistently reproduce, there’s a good chance the root cause can be tracked down and eradicated.

Update Drivers.

If not, reformat.

Ignore all the fanboi crap, and just tell me what the screen says. You can do it in a PM if you want to.

@IchtheosaurusRex I know, I know… sorry for the wise crack. I use pc at work and I lost files before from a similar occurrence… its very irritating when files aren’t backed up.