Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

On the whole, I'm really enjoying Windows 7 - I've migrated eight of my computers over to Microsoft's latest operating system, and it's working great on all of them. As you can tell from the above screen shot, however, I hit a snag with one of the systems. You'll never believe what caused the problem though: a font. I'd installed Windows 7 on a brand new Intel Core i7-based media machine (yes, an article is forthcoming) and it was running smoothly. I had a bunch of fonts I wanted to install, so I grabbed them all and dragged them into the font folder. They were installing, when all of a sudden bam, my system blue-screened (BSOD). I was shocked, and initially thought it was a problem with my aggressive overclock (I pushed the Core i7 920 CPU from 2.66 Ghz up to 4.2 Ghz) even though I'd torture tested the system for days without a problem. I clocked my system back to normal, and tried to install the fonts again - and bam, it crashed again! Read more...

"Also known as the BSoD, the Blue Screen of Death appears when Windows crashes or locks up. It’s actually a Windows “stop” screen, and is designed to do two things: tell you the reason for the error, and to calm your nerves, hence the use of the color blue (studies show it has a relaxing effect on people). Though Blue Screens are difficult to decipher, all the information you need to figure out what caused it is right there in front of you in blue and white—and that’s where we come in. We’re going to show you how to dissect the blue screen error details, so you can fix the problem that’s causing them."

The BSOD has certainly become rarer in recent years (I have not seen one in a while), but this is a pretty interesting article regardless. If you don't get BSOD's you'll still learn a few things and if you do, you should be able to diagnose them better.