Blue screen of death!

[RisingFalls]

Occasionally, when I open any full screen program or game, my Windows crashes with the dreaded blue screen of death, and restarts.

It flashes too quickly for me to read what it says, but I'm pretty sure it's either because my Windows is messed up, or I'm pushing my 8600 GTS too hard.

Which is it?..

 

[PwnagePanda]

Well it would help to know at least part of what it says. The standard procedure is to download the latest driver for your video card and install it; making sure to first clear out the old driver and it's registries. If that didn't work the second thing I would do is scan the crap out of your pc with an anti-virus; although if the video driver didn't solve the problem I wouldn't be too hopeful of this helping. Finally I'd reformat, just scan and back up any files that you really want to keep...

Then again you may want to wait for another opinion before reformatting

 

[farinha]

Before format I would check the temps of your build and the memories. To check the memories you can use memtest.

 

[murdocsvan]

it just sounds like your computer is overheating, or more specifically, the GPU. what sort of games are you playing? run ATITool and see what the temps are. anything below 50C on idle should be fine