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The Blue Screen of Death (also known as a stop error, BSOD, bluescreen, or Blue Screen of Doom) is an error screen displayed by some operating systems, most notably Microsoft Windows, after encountering a critical system error which can cause the system to shut down, to prevent damage.

Bluescreens on NT-based Windows systems can be caused by poorly written device drivers or malfunctioning hardware. In the Win9x era, incompatible DLLs or bugs in the kernel of the operating system could also cause bluescreens.

Bluescreens can also be caused by physical faults such as faulty memory, power supply issues, overheating of components, or hardware running beyond its specification limits. Bluescreens have been present in all Windows-based operating systems since Windows 3.1; earlier, OS/2 and MS-DOS suffered the Black Screen of Death, and early builds of Windows Vista displayed the Red Screen of Death after a boot loader error.

The term "Blue Screen of Death" originated during OS/2 pre-release development activities at Lattice Inc, the makers of an early Windows and OS/2 C compiler. During porting of Lattice's other tools, developers encountered the stop screen when NULL pointers were dereferenced either in application code or when unexpectedly passed into system API calls. During reviews of progress and feedback to IBM Austin, the developers described the stop screen as the Blue Screen of Death to denote the screen and the finality of the experience.




Display
By default, the display is white lettering (CGA color 0x0F; HTML color #FFFFFF) on a blue background (CGA color 0x01; HTML color #0000AA,) with information about current memory values and register values. For visually impaired users, Microsoft has added a utility that allows the user to change a setting in SYSTEM.INI that controls the colors that the BSoD code uses to any of the 16 CGA colors. Doing so requires the edit or addition of the "MessageBackColor=X" and "MessageTextColor=X" lines to the [386enh] section of the SYSTEM.INI, where X is a hexadecimal number from 0 to F corresponding with a color in the CGA 16-color palette.

Windows 95, 98 and Me use 80x25 text mode. The Windows NT BSoD uses 80x50 text mode. The screen resolution is 720x400. The XP BSoD uses the Lucida Console font while the Vista BSoD uses the Consolas font.

When getting the BSoD, the screen will go blank for about a second and any playing audio will start to skip, and then a dark blue screen will come up with white writing.



Details
Each BSoD usually displays a message such as FILE_SYSTEM, and a number like 0x00000022. The usual parameters displayed for the BSoD are these:

number of error (parameter, parameter, parameter, parameter) name of error

All of the above information is important in understanding and determining the cause of the BSOD.

Depending on the value "number of error", all, some or even none of the parameters contain data pertaining to what went wrong, and/or where it happened.