The BSOD, or Blue Screen of Death, is an iconic error screen that anyone who’s ever used a Windows PC has liekly come across at one time or another. It’s no fun, and it can mean there’s a problem with your PC that needs fixing. But in most cases, it’s just one of those things that crops up, and simply keeping your PC updated will be enough to prevent it from coming up again.

Here’s everything you need to know about BSODs in Windows 11, and what to do if you get one.

The stop error screen, or as it’s colloquially known for its blue coloring, the BSOD, is an error screen that appears when something has gone critically wrong with your PC. It doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally broken, but it means something has gone so wrong with it that it can no longer function and needs to reboot to get working again.

The screen has always used an iconic blue coloring, with initial versions utilizing that color due to the limitations in color palettes on PCs at the time. Today, however, it retains its blue coloring for consistency. The warning will also typically contain a sad emoji face in ASCII characters, an error code of some kind, and a QR code for easier troubleshooting.

The BSOD has been a Windows error screen since some of its earliest versions, and has since become both a useful tool for troubleshooting problems with a PC and somewhat of a meme about PC problems and the way in which Windows computers can be more prone to errors than some other platforms.

Blue error screens like this can be caused for a wide variety of reasons, although driver errors are one of the most common. They can also be caused by faulty hardware, overheating components, issues with the power supply’s consistency, software bugs, badly installed Windows updates, or bugs in the operating system itself.

They’re wide ranging enough that a BSOD doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world, but if they come up often with the same error messages, you probably have something in your system that needs fixing or replacing.

If you weren’t doing anything particularly noteworthy or different with your PC, or haven’t made any overt changes to it in the recent past, then you can probably just reboot your PC and continue using it as you were before. It may have just been one of those weird quirks of using a Windows PC, and you’ll not see that screen come up again.

However, if you consistently get a BSOD when performing certain tasks, or you find it appearing more often, then you may want to take further steps.

The first, is to look up the error code you’ve been given. This may be something like “CRITICAL_PROCESS DIED” or “IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.” If this error code is the same every time you get a BSOD, you can Google these phrases to look for specific instructions on how to fix that problem, or scan the QR code for a more immediate solution.

If the error code you encounter has a specific method of fixing it, great! Follow those steps to see if that solves your problem. If it doesn’t, though, or you find yourself facing seemingly random BSOD error messages, you can try some of these more general fixes.

Try using your PC for a while again after that to see if it solves the issue. If it does, excellent! You can then try reinstalling the software or update to see if the issue reappears. If it does, you can roll it back and wait for an update.

However, if making system changes hasn’t stopped the BSOD from appearing, you may need to try some other fixes.