What Is A Blue Screen Error:

Blue Screen errors occur when:

• Windows detects an error it cannot recover from without losing data
• Windows detects that critical OS data has become corrupted
• Windows detects that hardware has failed in a non-recoverable fashion
• The exact text displayed has changed over the years from a dense wall of information in Windows NT 4.0 to the comparatively sparse message employed by modern versions of Windows.

Tool Tip #2
Checking For Solutions

If Action Center does pop up with a message that it’s found a problem, clicking on the problem itself will pop up a solutions window. If appropriate, you can have Windows itself try to find and fix the problem.  Windows will happily try to check for solutions for every perceived problem. If you look at the "Check for Solutions" control panel applet, it can seem a little daunting.

At first blush, this seems like I had a huge number of problems. Wasn’t Windows 7 supposed to be more stable?

In fact, it is. Many of those issues were reported shortly after I’d installed Windows 7 and associated applications, but before I’d updated all those apps. The problems reported with Outlook, for example, have disappeared since I updated Office.

Windows 7 has been a major success for Microsoft. But no operating system is perfect, and you will encounter problems on occasion. The vast array of hardware, drivers, and applications available for Windows necessarily means that issues will inevitably crop up.

The good news: Windows 7 gives you a robust set of tools to track down problems you encounter. We’ll take a look at a number of those tools, and how they can help you in your problem solving.

Given the complexity of the modern PC, it’s easy to think that any issue you encounter is an OS issue. I once had a user contact me about a technical issue back in the Windows XP era. He raged at some length about how poorly Microsoft had designed Windows, and how Windows needed to do a better job of helping him troubleshoot his PC. His actual problem turned out to be a bad southbridge. His USB controller had apparently died, so the system never made it past the POST, locking on the USB enumeration phase. I’m not sure how Windows could have helped him with that particular problem. Anyway...

Often times, I get asked the question if registry cleaner programs should be used? And quite a number of times when computers come in for repairs because of some sort of software corruption, registry cleaning software is installed on computers.

The purpose of these cleaners are to attempt to remove configuration data from the windows registry that is no longer in use or that is unwanted by the system.  The cleaner attempts to pick out the unnecessary values in order to delete or repair them.

In theory, registry cleaners are to improve performance of computers by ridding the registry of redundant information.  Due to the sheer size of the registry database, manually cleaning up debris and invalid entries would be impractical, therefore cleaners are essentially tools that automate the process.