Registry Clean and Repair

The XP blue screen of death as it is commonly known can arise for a number of reasons. Usually, maybe 80% of the time, it is due to a hardware or driver problem.

But in a few cases, the error message shown mentions the registry. e.g. “Registry Error”. So what can you do?

Rule Out Hardware

Even when the registry is mentioned, whilst you are most likely to have a corrupt registry (which we will soon fix), you may actually have a hard disk failure. What you need to do is to try and scan the disk first for errors. There is a guide from Microsoft on how to do this in XP here.

Cannot Start The Computer

In the worst case scenario, you won’t even be able to start the computer or it will quickly go into a cyclical loop of rebooting to the blue screen. In this case you need to try to enter the PC in safe mode by pressing F5 or F8 while Windows is starting. Just press them both a few times when the PC boots up and you will be allowed to choose safe mode.

Hopefully this will work for you and you can avoid the blue error screen and run the disk scan above.

Fix The Registry

Probably you will not have a hard disk failure. If you do, either it will not work at all or it will continue to work for some time, albeit with bad sectors. But don’t worry, as long as you ran the hard drive scan earlier then any bad sectors of the disk will be “marked” so that they can no longer be used. I still advise you to buy a new hard disk in the next few days or weeks though because bad sectors are usually a sign of imminent total disk failure!

Now, assuming there is no HD or other hardware problem, we need to fix the registry. The only way to do this is with a registry scanner. Sadly, the blue screen XP registry error does not give you anywhere near the level of information required to go in and do a manual fix.

Use a registry scanner (see free scan below) to first detect all of your registry errors. You are likely to have many more than the one that caused this blue screen, each of which has the potential to cause yet more blue screens in future. Secondly, push a button to fix all the errors (or you can optionally choose which ones to fix and which not to fix if you so wish).

Finally, regular use of a registry cleaner on a weekly basis will prevent getting blue screen error messages for the future.