BSOD (and some good news)

December 22, 2004 · Comments

Also known as “Blue Screen of Death”

I bought this PC 11.5 months ago, and until today I knew “BSOD” but I had no idea what it looked like. Now I know. I was working along, minding my own business, when suddenly the screen went black. A second later a blue screen popped up talking about some sort of error and that I should check for new hardware, yadda yadda yadda. I literally jumped with the screen blanked, thinking there was a power issue. I restart the computer, thoroughly checked the drive and all seems fine.

Now before you shout “I told you sos” at me and advise me to throw this Dell out the Window and go back to the safety of my Mac OS world (you know who you are and that you were thinking it), I have to say I know this is similar to the Mac OS X [kernel panic.](http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106227) It’s happened twice on my iBook in the past two years. Both times, I restarted and didn’t worry about it again. I couldn’t draw a link between either instance. Sometimes, these things just happen and as long as it doesn’t happen again with any predictable regularity the best thing to do is create another backup and move on.

This time, on the PC, I know exactly what I was doing at the time. I had just installed [Microsoft FrontPage 2003](http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/). Yeah, you read that right. I bought the software a few months ago, but I had been procrastinating installing it. A while back, [I mentioned](http://www.momathome.com/viewfromhome/design/a_new_website_to_talk_about.php) that I was in competition to get a contract to work on a website for the State of Connecticut. I didn’t want to say anything here until it was official. Well, I’m happy to report that my shiny new contract is signed and approved and I start on January 1. I will be working on two websites. One is for the [CT Council on Developmental Disabilities.](http://www.state.ct.us/ctcdd/) All State of CT websites are migrating to the ct.gov portal, and I’m joining the team just as the Council’s website is beginning that transition. This isn’t a terribly “sexy” job…it’s a lot of straight, dry information but it needs to be presented clearly. The site was done in FrontPage, and once the transition is complete I’ll be working on it in the State’s CMS (content management system). I only need FrontPage for what amounts to a few weeks worth of transition work. I’ll also be doing a new website from scratch for the Council that I’ll talk more about at another time as it gets off the ground.

So I just installed FP and ran Office update to make sure it was completely up to date. The update went fine. I launched the application and was just browsing the menus when the BSOD hit. Something related to that installation? Maybe. We’ll see what happens next time I try to launch it (which will be after I’ve closed out Outlook or any other application that I don’t want to get zapped by a sudden system failure, just to be safe). I back up all my Quickbooks/Quicken and Outlook files nightly to an external drive and to my G5 across the network (and my G5 is in turn backed up to *two* separate external drives). That alone means that I shouldn’t lose any data, right? It must be a law somewhere that says that the drives that aren’t backed up that go south first.

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