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SYSK 335: What Causes Windows to Blue Screen?

Ever wonder what are the circumstances of when Windows blue screens?  To my knowledge, if an unhandled exception occurs in kernel-mode code (e.g. a privileged device driver or the OS kernel itself), Windows considers it too unsafe to keep running, so it stops all running applications and blue screens.

 

 

Published Tuesday, April 24, 2007 5:02 AM by irenak

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# re: SYSK 335: What Causes Windows to Blue Screen?

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 1:21 PM by Chris Romp

I keep getting a blue screen (Vista) when I put my EV-DO PC-card into its slot with the error (something like) "Page fault in non-paged area."  Turns out it has an IRQ conflict with my smartcard reader, though I need both.

Why this bluescreens instead of just not working, I'm still not certain.

Interestingly enough, if I disable my smartcard reader, then put in the PC-card, and re-enable my smartcard reader, then they'll both work until I reboot.

Every bluescreen I've gotten under XP or Vista has appeared to be hardware related, however.  I'd say that's a compliment to the software! =)

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