Win 10 / 11 · Maintenance

Fix a blue screen (BSOD) without panicking

A blue screen looks dramatic but it's usually Windows protecting itself from a bad driver or a flaky stick of RAM. The stop code tells you which.

Before you start

Medium risk. This change is reversible — you can return to the previous state without professional help or data loss.

Turn off automatic restart first or the screen vanishes before you can read it: System Properties → Advanced → Startup and Recovery → uncheck 'Automatically restart'.
When the stop code is vague, the crash dump isn't. Minidumps land in C:\Windows\Minidump, and a free reader like BlueScreenView names the offending driver in seconds — no debugger to install.
Blue screens that only arrive under load — gaming, rendering, long file copies — point at heat or the power supply rather than a driver. Check temperatures before you start rolling drivers back.
If Windows won't stay up long enough to change anything, do the rollback from Safe Mode instead of fighting the desktop.

Read the stop code at the bottom (e.g. DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL) and search that exact string — generic 'BSOD fix' articles are mostly noise
If it started after an update or a new driver, roll back: Settings → Windows Update → Update history → Uninstall updates, or Device Manager → Roll back driver on the suspect device
Event Viewer → Windows Logs → System: look for red errors in the minutes before each crash — they name the culprit file
Run Windows Memory Diagnostic (search 'mdsched') to rule out bad RAM; a failing stick shows up as random BSODs across different drivers

No new BSODs after the rollback/driver change, and Event Viewer shows no red errors in the minutes before past crashes.

BSODs continue with different stop codes — bad RAM is likely; run Windows Memory Diagnostic and test sticks one at a time.

Next stop: the related fixes below, or start a guided diagnosis.