Less blue screens of death – Do you know why there are less BSOD’s?

The dreaded blue screen of death.  When you see it, it looks pretty scary.  A royal blue screen accompanied by cryptic white font messages.  There is always some number at the top that means nothing to the average computer user.

Nowadays, the blue screen of death (BSOD) hasn’t reared its ugly head as much.  Why is that?  Well, Windows XP dealt with a lot of device driver issues.  Compatibility problems where the hardware couldn’t speak properly to the command of the operating system, or device driver, was the big culprit.  Windows Vista inherited these device driver issues.  But, Windows 7 and Windows 8 supported computers have seen less BSOD’s.

Here’s what Microsoft saw that caused the blue screens of deaths:

• The Microsoft support team learned that the operating system wasn’t communicating well with the device drivers.
• Microsoft also saw major memory corruption going on, where the memory cannot allocated the proper resources for the driver.
• Drivers were hanging the system while trying to work.

Here are the utilities Microsoft techs created to limit blue screen of deaths:

1. Slam – Checks drivers to make sure they’ll work properly work with the Windows computers.
2. Slayer – Stops memory corruption by allocating memory properly to drivers.
3. Terminator – Finds driver bugs and removes them.

You have to love the warrior-like names of the Microsoft service utilities.  I’m not sure if it instills confidence or fear.