The Blue Screen of Death for Dummies

Ah, the evil blue screen of death. Now, my home PC is running a (pirated) version of XP and is remarkably stable for a computer bought in August '99. My work laptop, running Win2K and Notes as the email client? That crashes daily.

The death screen isn't as easy to figure out. In fact, there's often no way for anyone except a technician packing professional-grade diagnostic tools to find the culprit. A bug in one program can corrupt data in
the computer's memory, causing an entirely different program to crash later. Bad hardware will also often lead to software errors; when the hardware doesn't send back data as expected, programs will start to fail. "A broad range of conditions can cause a Fatal Exception error," shrugs Microsoft's help documentation. "As a result, troubleshooting a Fatal Exception error can be difficult."

I'm sure if I asked any of my geekier friends, they'd agree and shrug as well, "True dat." Except that the article does point out for prosumers a likely solution (other than buying a grumpy geek beer):

You probably won't be able to figure out what's wrong with your computer by reading the gibberish on the Blue Screen of Death, but you can make an educated guess. A few years ago, Microsoft set up the Windows Error Reporting Service to help find out where crashes come from. After a Windows application—or your whole PC—shuts down, a box pops up asking you to send a confidential error report. Using pattern-matching software to sift through the data from millions of these reports, Microsoft
discovered a surprising statistic. Seventy percent of Windows crashes involve one particular kind of software: device drivers. (I couldn't get stats for the Mac, but, at least anecdotally, device drivers are a major cause of drop-dead crashes.)

So, in conclusion:

...If your computer is crashing regularly, you won't do any harm by looking for new device drivers. (One exception: Don't mess with video drivers unless you know what you're doing—you could end up with an
unusable computer.) Always be sure to save a copy of your current driver before installing a new one (click here for instructions). If your new driver causes more problems than it cures, Windows XP has a Control Panel option to roll back to the previous version, or you can swap it back manually on older versions of Windows. You can always just cross your fingers, search the Web, and try again.