Good question Dean,

I too did not know what the "BLUE SCREEN" was about till I started getting
them. They did not show up on my computer till I upgraded from NT 3.51 to NT
4.0 - I guess that is progress. Typically, the "blue screen of death" is a
message that NT (Windows XP is a version of NT) produces as a last gasp to
give you some insight as to what failed. Early failures gave the notorious
message of "IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL".

In my video failure case, there was a blue screen with white lettering that
reported an infinite loop in the video driver ATI2DVAG. Apparently, the XP
OS does have a hardware interrupt that breaks it free from an infinite loop
caused by other software. Unfortunately, the loop caused a system failure
from which the OS could not recover. This resulted in the blue screen
message and a memory dump.

An alternate blue screen that I got gave a message of
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA - this lead me to various links that included
hardware failure causes. RAM checked out ok, video drivers did not make a
difference, and taking out the video card fixed the issues - so...

Hope this helps someone, and gives you a reasonable explanation.
Incidentally, if you have never experienced the dreaded blue screen, as it
appears you have not, I commend you on running a clean computer!

Peter
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-----Original Message-----
I was reading Peter's question about a possible failing video card, and it
got me wondering:  Why is it a
**blue** screen of death when your computer crashes?

I have had black screens - that makes sense.  (SP2 caused them.)

But why Blue?  It seems that if the computer crashes, then garbage should be
going to the video card and GIGO!

Dean Kukral

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