Diagnose Blue Screen of death Messages in XP

The blue screen of death(BSOD) is a quite shocking display image containing white text on a blue background that is generated by Windows operating systems when the system has rapidly terminated with an error. The system is locked up and should be restarted. The blue screen may include some hexadecimal values from a core dump that may help determine what caused the crash. The Blue Screen of Death appears when an error in the Windows kernel (the core) and the system has failed to recover. Often this is caused by corrupt software, low virtual memory(If you want to increase your virtual memory you can take help from my previous post Steps to Increase the Virtual Memory in Windows XP), hardware problem or corrupt hardware drivers.

Commonly, your system screen will turn blue with numerous lines of white text and then automatically restart. These lines of text actually tell you what is causing the BSOD error. Unfortunately, the screen only appears for just about one second. In order to diagnose the problem, you will have to find another way to view the screen at length.

Steps to Diagnose Blue Screen of death Messages in XP:-

1. Right-click on My Computer
2. Then select Properties.
3. After that click on Advanced System Settings button.
4. Then click on Settings under the Startup and Recovery option.
5. Check the box next to Write an event to the system log and check the box next to Automatically restart. Most likely, these boxes will already be checked.
6. Click on the BlueScreenView v1.00 link below.
7. Then click on Download BlueScreenView (in Zip file).
8. Then, select Open With option.
9. This will open the BlueScreenView window.
10. Click on the first file in the upper pane of the BlueScreenView window. The file will read something similar to Mini072409-01.dmp. Once you click on the file, a lower pane will open with several lines of text.
11. Search the lower pane until you find where it says The problem seems to be caused by the following file. This sentence will be followed by the name of the file or drive that is causing the blue screen error message. Generally, the problem can be fixed by reinstalling or updating this file or drive.
12. Repeat the two previous steps for every file listed in the BlueScreenView window.