Recording - June 2015 - 40

By Michael Nickolas
The dreaded Blue Screen Of Death, or BSOD: a sight no
music creator ever wants to see displayed on his or her computer screen. It can appear without warning, with no opportunity to save your work. You are kicked out of whatever you were
doing and left staring at the blue background with white letters
proclaiming "Windows has been shut down to prevent damage
to your computer" (Windows 7) or "Your PC ran into a problem
that it couldn't handle, and now it needs to restart" (Windows
8). Wow, what just happened?
In most cases, what's causing the BSOD can readily be identified.
Go back to the last change you made to your hardware, software
or operating system and you're probably looking at the culprit. But
sometimes it's not that easy, maybe because multiple changes were
made simultaneously or, pardon the pun, the BSOD is coming out
of the blue. In this article, I am focusing on Windows 7, still the most
common version in use on music computers; the process may be
slightly different in places for Windows 8 and beyond.
Where to start
The message displayed on the blue screen may give you a
hint of where to start the search for a solution. If your computer
is quickly rebooting after the BSOD and therefore not giving you
time to study the message, do the following after the reboot.
In the Control Panel click on the System icon. From there, click
through to Advanced System Settings > Startup and Recovery >
Settings button. In the System Failure window, uncheck
Automatically Restart. Now error messages will stay displayed
until you initiate a reboot.
The error code might show a driver issue, a page fault, a bad
pool header, etc. Not knowing what any of that means, halting
on the blue screen will at least give you an opportunity to note
the message for a Google search or to present to a support tech.
The fixes
With a bias towards a computer used as a DAW, and having
recently gone through this exercise personally, here in no particular order are ten possible fixes for blue screen crashes.
1. Remove/disable possible conflicting hardware you're not
using.
If you have multiple ASIO devices installed, remove the ones
you can live without from your DAW. Remove expansion cards
that are no longer needed or in use. If you're not using the audio
interface built into your computer's motherboard, enter the BIOS
and disable it. While you're there, go ahead and disable any
built-in hardware you're not using. For example, my studio computer is not connected to the Internet, so I've disabled the builtin network connector.
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RECORDING June 2015

2. Update your drivers and device firmware.
Check the manufacturers' websites for devices still in use. If
they are offering updated drivers to the ones you are using,
download and install-especially in the case of your video driver. Look for firmware updates, too. Firmware is code specific to
and stored in memory of a hardware device, like a USB mixer.
Firmware updates often fix crashes and compatibility issues.
Multiple ASIO devices don't like to share and sometimes
won't play well together, causing crashes. Instead of using an
individual driver for each, try the "asio4all" driver. It is designed
as a single driver to control multiple ASIO devices and may stabilize your DAW.
If, after making these driver updates, there are still BSODs, try
using the Microsoft-provided video driver instead of the manufacturer's. From the Control Panel click through to System > Device
Manager > Display Adapters. Right click on your model and choose
Update Driver Software. Then click Browse My Computer > Let Me
Pick From A List Of Device Drivers On My Computer. Choose the
one with Microsoft Corporation in the name (see Figure 1).
3. Update your computer's BIOS (basic input/output system)
and reset to the defaults.
This one is scary but necessary. It's scary because you have
to wipe out your old BIOS to install the new, and should anything go wrong you are left in limbo. That said, in my many
years of working with computers I've not had a single bad outcome when updating the BIOS. I hold my breath, but it always
updates fine. If you are running the latest BIOS version for your
motherboard, you should try resetting it to use the defaults.
4. Make sure your FireWire interface is updated and on a reliable controller card.
FireWire was never common on Windows machines, but
enough good FireWire interfaces are still out there that you might
have picked one up, only to run into a BSOD. If updating its driver and firmware didn't help, try using the "firewire legacy driver"
to control your interface. This is done the same way as you chose
the Microsoft video driver, except under Device Manager, you
choose IEEE 1394 Bus host controllers, and when you get to Let

Recording - June 2015

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