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Comment by LandR | Hacker News Reader

I still get Windows 11 BSOD. That definitely hasn't gone away!

Commonly that isn't a software issue though, that's a hardware problem being [correctly] indicated by software. With three notable exceptions:

- Windows 1.0 through ME era: Legitimately an unstable OS due to dangerous memory model/lack of memory isolation.

- Windows NT through XP: Before KPP was added, software was monkey-patching the kernel, and it was causing instability (particularly multiple trying to over-patch each other). For example during that era it wasn't UNCOMMON for antivirus to do so as a matter of course.

- Windows Vista Specific: They made significant changes to the driver model of several popular device types, and manufacturers weren't ready. So a lot of driver-related failures.

But since then, it has mostly be smooth sailing. If you see a BSOD, you can trace it down, and more often than not the source will be underlying hardware failure which is why BSOD exists and isn't a software bug or problem.

I still remember when Vista had just come out and I installed it on my computer. I was getting such annoying hangups and blue screens constantly.

Turns out it was my sound card, or at least it's drivers. It was some super cheap Crystal-based one. It would have some glitch during the permissions swap of the UAC environment, and when it went to play that ding it would break the system and require a hard power off. If I muted the computer before the UAC, it was fine.

Pulled the sound card and it ran fine.

And even that got worse - now there's no driver name, exception address or stop codes, so you can't even web search for anything.

All of this is logged just the same in event logs. It's just not displayed right on the blue screen message.

If the system BSODs, you have no way of getting to the event log without restarting and successfully booting into the OS again.

That is a strictly worse system than displaying BSOD information right away, which lets you diagnose it immediately, it's a downgrade, which is what this entire thread is about.

If the system BSODs you really want to get the memory dump and look at that. The driver faulted immediately isn't always the cause. So this also helps with not faulting something that might not actually be the cause.

Since Windows 7, which was I think almost 20 years ago, I've seen a single BSOD.

I've seen more on MacOs/OSX in the same time frame.

I’ve seen them from AMD and Nvidia drivers.

Antivirus on my work Windows laptop has caused countless BSODs. VPN clients are often junk.

I had a KVM that could occasionally trigger one.

Windows itself seems to be pretty BSOD free. It is almost always something installed after or hardware.

I still see BSODs on random public displays all over the world while traveling.

There's got to be a subreddit for that I'm sure

Sure they might be using older unpatched Windows but it only reinforces its reputation of being crap and perpetuates the meme.

the "error'd" series on thedailywtf.com

independent blogs can still exist! Not everything must be a subreddit!

Eh, take a pic of the BSOD and see what the error is based on. Having worked support for a long time you'll commonly find those things are bad ram or overheating hardware.

Quite often you'll see non-windows displays like that crashed too.

Try switching from IDE compatibility mode to AHCI or RAID.

Personal anecode of course but last time I've seen one was around ~2010.

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