- The Dreaded 'Blue Screen of Death'

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Return to archive

E-mail your tech question

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

The Dreaded 'Blue Screen of Death'

9/16 -- This Guy Got It When His Memory Ran Out

If you're confused by your
computer or bewildered
by the Web, now is a good time
to seek advice from
The Help! Menu by clicking on
helpmenu@ibsys.com.
Please include your hometown and state.

Hi, Helpmenu,

I get the following error message when I sign on: "A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C0013 F7A in VXD VMM(01)+0012F7A. The current application will be terminated." I am using Windows 98. The message appears in a blue screen, and It doesn't appear everytime I sign on. Could you offer any suggestions to fixing this very annoying problem? I appreciate your help.

Ken, Madison, Wisc.

Ken,

Don't let this happen to you Whenever Windows shows an error message in white text on a blue background, it is said that your computer is suffering the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD). This expression is so pervasive that I've overheard people in my office say things like, "Since I installed MegaPowerBuilder 5.5, my machine's been BSODing every few hours!" Every Windows user eventually sees the BSOD. I've even heard of some clever wags using a BSOD as a screensaver just to be cheeky. Here's what one looks like:

When you see "blue screen" messages, it usually means that a core software component is suffering unrecoverable memory faults. In your case, you are getting this message when you sign on, so a fundamental part of your operating system is failing as it attempts to build the desktop. This specific message is telling you that the Virtual Memory Manager (VMM), a type of Virtual Extended Device Driver (VXD), has encountered a "fatal exception" at the memory address 0028:C0013F7A. Programmers user the term "fatal exception" to describe an error from which there is no recovery. Hence the "death" in BSOD.

Fatal Memories

What is causing the memory manager to fail? Maybe you have a defective RAM chip. Circuits fail much more often when they are hot, so if this error occurs only when your computer has been on for a while, I would be suspicious of bad memory. It's also possible that you have a defective CPU. However, it's a lot more likely that the problem is caused by poorly written or misconfigured software. Sometimes the only thing you can do is to reinstall your operating system, but let's try a few other things before we resort to something so serious and time-consuming.

The first thing do to is to update all of your drivers and software. If you have an ATI video card, go to the ATI site and download the latest patch for that card. If you have a 3Com Ethernet card, go to their site and install the latest drivers. These components have software that is loaded at startup and it may be causing a memory conflict. If you have drivers for devices that no longer reside in your system, uninstall them.

The next thing to do is to boot into "safe mode" several times. You can force your computer into a more basic mode by pressing the F5 key when you see "Starting Windows. . ." You may have to press it several times. Safe mode prevents your computer from accessing some of the more failure-prone components, like networking and video. If you cannot replicate the error in safe mode, a device driver is probably causing it. By disabling one component at a time and experimenting until you are reasonably sure which device is causing the failure, you should be able to track the error down. If this detective work is inconclusive, or if the error persists, I would start looking at memory and memory management.

Getting Around Your Memory Limits

Because your error is specific to the memory manager, you may be able to work around it by giving the VMM more "virtual memory" to manage. Virtual memory is a technique used to increase the amount of RAM you computer thinks it has by reading and writing blocks of memory to your hard drive when actual RAM memory runs out. It's not as fast as RAM, but it's still a reasonable alternative for many applications. The virtual memory manager swaps bytes between the RAM chips and hard drive, so the portion of the hard drive that is used for this juggling act is referred to as swap space.

Many Windows users recommend setting the minimum and maximum size of your swap file to be exactly twice as large as the amount of RAM you have. If you have 64 megabytes of RAM, then you should allocate 128 Megs of hard drive space for your swap file. Make sure you have at least that much free space on your drive, then go into Start-> Settings-> Control Panel-> System-> Performance -> Advanced Settings-> Virtual Memory and check the "Let me specify my own virtual memory settings" button. Here you want to set both minimum and maximum to be twice your RAM in megabytes. When you make this change, Windows will prompt you with a very frightening warning message about how dangerous this is. However, if VMM were doing its job, we wouldn't be doing this, and sometimes you just have to take things into your own hands. With luck, you will reboot and this BSOD will no longer appear.

The Inevitability Of (Blue) Death

Talk about ironies: while I was writing this article and messing around with software settings, my computer went into the BSOD! I hope this doesn't happen to you. I did find a somewhat heretical resource that claims that this problem is specifically caused by device driver-bundling in Windows 98. This FAQ explains how you can overcome this problem by separating the drivers into their component elements. I can't necessarily recommend this, but this revolutionary solution might be the answer.

More about Windows fatal exception errors: Click here.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]