Blue screen of death

If you use windows xp as your operating system then you may have seen the blue screen of death.  Usually this appears when something is seriously wrong with your computer and it is your computers way of saying it is shutting down to protect itself from damage.

One of the things it will display is a STOP code, which in general will be a seqence of zeros and numbers and tells the engineer or microsoft what it is that is causing the problem, sometimes.

It may well be that once you are on this screen rebooting the computer just brings you back to the BSOD.  If this happens then my advice is do not touch anything and call an engineer or if you are lucky enough to live in and around Mayenne then call me.

Even if you get out of the BSOD on rebooting it still means there is a major problem and either you will eventually return to that screen or the whole operating system could be compromised and may need reinstalling.

Invariably the problem is due to a new piece of software, a new peripheral or as recently the case with a customer I saw on saturday, 3 particularly nasty viruses. which were dealt with and the problem cured.

This is why it is extremely important to make sure your anti virus is running and up to date, that your firewall is on and your windows updates are on and you are installing them when they are downloaded.  Also get a freebie antispyware and malware programme and run it often.