The blue screen of death (BSOD) error is something every Windows user runs into sooner or later. It’s a frustrating problem, as it’s often tough to troubleshoot and can pop up out of nowhere.
We’ll walk you through some basic tips on how to fix a blue screen on Windows 10 (and 11), as well as provide resources for specific blue screen error codes.
In case you’re not sure what a blue screen problem even is, let’s first review this important Windows term.
What’s commonly called a “blue screen of death” in Windows 10, Windows 11, and other versions is technically known as a stop error or fatal system error. This occurs when the operating system crashes, meaning that it ran into some issue that prevented it from running safely. When this happens, Windows displays a blue screen with some information about the problem
A blank, blue screen on a computer is never a welcome sight. It means something has crashed the computer so badly that immediate steps must be taken to recover the system.
A Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), aka a STOP Error, appears when an issue is so serious that Windows must stop loading. It’s usually hardware or driver related; most will show a STOP code to help you figure out the root cause.
If the blue screen flashes and your computer reboots automatically you’ll need to disable the ‘automatic restart on system failure’ setting. Below are general Blue Screen of Death troubleshooting steps.
Please see our List of Blue Screen Error Codes for individual STOP code troubleshooting steps. Come back here if we don’t have a troubleshooting guide for your specific STOP code or if you have no idea

Microsoft is investigating a regarded situation foremost to Blue Display of Loss of life (BSOD) crashes with 0xc000021a mistakes soon after putting in the Home windows 10 KB5021233 cumulative update launched throughout this month’s Patch Tuesday.
The firm warned about the weekend that “following setting up KB5021233, some Windows units could possibly start up to an mistake (0xc000021a) with a blue screen.”
This comes following a stream of end users stories on Redmond’s very own local community web-site [1, 2, 3] and Reddit [1, 2, 3], some of them reporting that the update reverted quickly or that they’ve been in a position to fix the problem immediately after a technique restore.
The recognized difficulty is probably triggered by a mismatch among the file versions of hidparse.sys in system32 and procedure32/motorists in the Home windows folder, “which may possibly trigger signature validation to