How to fix a Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)

Few things are more frustrating. You’re in the middle of working on a project, reaching a major milestone in a game or maybe just booting up your Windows 10 computer and, just like that, the entire OS crashes and presents you with a Blue Screen of Death, usually for no immediately apparent reason.

In Windows-speak, the term “Blue Screen of Death” is usually abbreviated as BSOD. It describes an error of some kind that hits the operating system hard enough that it’s forced to quit. Microsoft itself labels such errors with “stopcodes.” Thus these errors may also be generically named “stop errors.” There’s