Windows 7 Black Screen of Death (BSOD)
 

My Windows 7 PC has caught the dreaded BSOD. It boots to a blank screen with a moveable mouse arrow. Nothing else - no icons, no toolbar. No matter what I do, I can't get out of this loop. It happened while my wife was on the PC writing an email - screen went all weird, then simply wouldn't re-start.

I have done a little research and apparently the W7 BSOD is a well known issue. One PC repair shop has quoted me £100 (about US$160) to fix it. All they'll do is back up all my data, format the drive and do a clean Win 7 install. Seems a bit brutal and I really don't want to have to go down that route unless I have to. God knows what settings/password keys/software codes I will have to find/remember/re-enter.

Anyone experienced this before? Is there a simpler solution out there to fix this or am I really stuffed?

Thanks all,

PPP

First thing I would do is verify that your system hard drive is in good condition using Hitachi DFT or the tool from your drive manufacturer. If it's good then you can start troubleshooting the issue and unless you have a surplus of funds or severe lack of time do not pay somebody else to sort it for you, I'm sure we can help you through it.

I assume you have attempted to launch into safe mode to no effect?

I had this happen in November. I was running Windows 7 on a 64Gb SSD. Luckly as I had most of my data on a seperate hard drive.

For me it turned out to be an early symptom of my SSD controller failing. After a couple of days it failed completely and I had to get a new drive to install windows on. Not good! :(

Boot from the W7 DVD, when asked chose Computerrepair and try a restore.

Win 7 64 ultimate it's the most rock solid OS I ever used... And I am with MS since MS-DOS. Being that said, I suspect you have essential OS files and/or registry corruption. Possible causes are some kind of viruse/malware or even hardware malfunction (specially hdd's).

When I am in a OC process a get dozens of BSOD trying to achieve stable clocks (CPU and mem clocks as well) but never damaged my OS, I am always able to reboot without any scratch.

Have you tried to run it in safe mode? If your able to do so, you might wanna check you system for possible virus and malware and use the system protection in order to do a system restore. Of course if you have any harmful software installed changes are that the system restore files are compromised as well.

Regards.