Strange BSOD

[Will Schuitman]

I've been using beta2 ever since it came out and have never had a BSOD
for the last 2 weeks I have been using RC1 , it has been running very
smoothly and Ive only had a few very minor issues mainly related to 3rd
party software.

However yesterday I clicked on "solitaire" and my screen went blank for
about 5 seconds after which my display went back to normal Solitaire had
failed to start and I had a taskbar notification saying "Failed directX
device"

I had a look in event viewer and it was listed as a "blue screen event" with
a minidump file
yet during this "blue screen event" my pc didn't reboot and I didn't see
that actual BSOD. I've reinstalled my video drivers and haven't had this
problem since

But I'm still very curious as to how this can be a BSOD without actually
getting the blue screen or the reboot

 

[Michael Palumbo]

I've been using beta2 ever since it came out and have never had a BSOD
for the last 2 weeks I have been using RC1 , it has been running very
smoothly and Ive only had a few very minor issues mainly related to 3rd
party software.

However yesterday I clicked on "solitaire" and my screen went blank for
about 5 seconds after which my display went back to normal Solitaire had
failed to start and I had a taskbar notification saying "Failed directX
device"

I had a look in event viewer and it was listed as a "blue screen event"
with a minidump file
yet during this "blue screen event" my pc didn't reboot and I didn't see
that actual BSOD. I've reinstalled my video drivers and haven't had this
problem since

But I'm still very curious as to how this can be a BSOD without actually
getting the blue screen or the reboot

Educated guess;

When a video driver fails it often doesn't actually have to restart the
system, simply restart the video sub-system (this works fantastically in
Unix/Linux) and it's possible that Vista simply restarted the video
sub-system when DirectX failed.

It may list it as a "blue screen event" because it had the typical
characteristics of a BSE and needs to show this in the log, even though it
didn't need to do a full restart to recover from the error.

Technically, not a BSoD since it wasn't a 'fatal' error, in that it was able
to recover without restarting the entire OS, but perhaps something not seen
very often, a BSoI (Black Screen of Inconvenience)

Hopefully someone will have a reply that's not just an educated guess, but
an educated truly factual explanation.

Mic

 

[Will Schuitman]

Thank you for the reply
regardless of any possible technical explanation, I believe this would be a
massive step forward, considdering if the same thing happend in windows XP,
9 out of ten times the system would reboot or simply freeze requiring a hard
reset