Blue-Screen Mashup

Yesterday my computer started unexpectedly rebooting. At first it happened sort of randomly during sessions, but after four or five reboots, it became completely unusable. It would boot all the way up into Windows, but as soon as we tried to start up an application, the screen would go dark, then a blue stop error screen would flash up there for a split second, then it would go back to the BIOS screen and start again from scratch! I had no idea what I was going to do, until I remembered a suggestion I read years ago from Fred Langa. The suggestion was that you could document an error screen using your digital camera. Since the screen was gone before I had a chance to read it, I figured that was the only way I was going to find out what the error was!

After a few tries to get the timing down, I got this blurry-but-mostly-readable shot of the screen:

By zooming into the shot on the camera, I was able to make out enough of the text to guess that I had a full hard disk. This made me wonder if I would be able to boot into Safe Mode so I could clear out some space. The Safe Mode trick worked, but it turned out I was not low on space at all! I ran CCleaner anyway, and then rebooted, and after that the machine worked fine. I suspect it may have had something to do with corrupt files in the Prefetcher, but I don't know for sure... all I know is that after clearing out unnecessary files with CCleaner, the machine started working again. So even though the camera may not have directly helped me in the long run, it did help me get past the mental block of not knowing what to do. Try it!