Windows XP Annoyances

Appendix E. Error Messages (Blue Screen of Death)

The Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) is aptly-named. It's blue, it fills the screen, and it means death for whatever you were working on before it appeared.

Microsoft refers to BSoD errors as "Stop Messages," a euphemistic term for the types of crashes that are serious enough to bring down the entire system. See Chapter 6 for troubleshooting the kinds of problems that are likely to cause these errors.

As explained in Chapter 6, a single error is no cause for concern. Only if an error happens a few times, or repeatedly, do you need to pursue any of the solutions listed here.

By default, Windows restarts your computer as soon as the BSoD appears, leaving almost no time to read the error message before it vanishes. To change this, go to Control Panel System Advanced tab, click Settings in the Startup and Recovery section, and turn off the Automatically restart option. (See below for more information on the Write debugging information options.)

However, turning off the Automatically restart option may not really be necessary. Every time you get a BSoD, Windows logs the error, although not in the standard Event Logs (eventvwr.msc) as you might expect. Instead, a single .wdl (WatchDog Log) file is created in the \Windows\LogFiles\Watchdog folder for each crash. Just open the most recently dated file in your favorite text editor (or Notepad) to view details of the crash and some related information.

In addition to the .wdl file created for each crash, a .dmp file is created in the \Windows\Minidump folder. These files are known as memory dumps, and contain some (or all) of the information in your computer's memory when the crash occurred. Typically only developers will be able to make use of this information, but it might be worth investigating if you're trying to solve a problem. To read the .dmp files, open a Command Prompt window (cmd.exe) and type dumpchk filename, where filename is the full path and file name of the .dmp file. To control how much information is written to the .dmp files, or to disable .dmp file creation altogether, return to the aforementioned Startup and Recovery Settings window.