If you’ve owned your PC for sometime, chances are, you’ve probably seen the Blue Screen of Death. The Blue Screen of Death or BSOD is the blue screen that appears when your PC totally crashes. First, there’s the blue screen, then back. The Blue Screen of Death can be attributed to a variety of problems. It could be a hardware problem, a defective RAM, power supply, or it’s commonly caused by a driver problem.

Most Blue Screen of Death messages will say, “windows encountered a critical error, blah, blah, try updating drivers to correct, etc, etc.” which means that Microsoft is suggesting that you do a driver update in order to correct the issue. If you’ve recently installed a hardware, the driver that needs updating could easily be pinpointed, however, if you already did a driver update but you still get the BSoD, it might be because other drivers are incompatible with your newly installed hardware. Herein lies the problem, if you’ve had your PC for five years, you’ve probably installed and uninstalled a lot of hardware and software that you won’t be able to keep track of which driver needs updating. In order to prevent this kind of scenario, you need to regularly update your drivers.

The manual way of updating your drivers is to go to your Control Panel, System, hardware, and click on the Device Manager. Expand everything and right click on the hardware and press “update driver”. Now if you really don’t have the time for that, you can just purchase a software that can regularly do this for you. DriverScanner 2009 is one of these software but it would set you back $29.95.