BSOD while recording or playing audio

June 03rd, 2009 | Category: DAW

The dreaded BSOD – Blue Screen of Death – seemed to be only a myth, a thing of legend on my DAW. I’ve happily recorded on this computer for a couple years, and I’ve never had any problems with stability. Then, out of nowhere, the BSOD reared its ugly head. I hadn’t changed any hardware or software settings, but was consistently getting blue-screened and rebooted while playing audio from both Sonar and Windows Media Player.

I finally traced the problem to a recent Windows Update – something called Software Distribution Service 3.0. I used System Restore to go back to a restore point before the update, and the problem disappeared.

3 comments

3 Comments so far

  1. Adam July 5th, 2009 7:40 pm

    Quick question – do you recall what the main error source was of the BSODs that you were receiving?

    I don’t suppose it was MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION?

    I’m getting a lot of those, but only when SONAR is running, and I’ve run diagnostics on all my hardware to make sure that there’s nothing faulty. I tend to think the solution you mention in your post might help me as well, but first I wonder if we received similar errors.

    Thanks for any help.

  2. Dave July 8th, 2009 11:52 am

    All I remember was that I could not track the error code down to anything specific. It was a generic error code that could mean any number of things. I think MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION is also that way.

  3. Third Take » Software Distribution Service 3.0 Strikes Again August 12th, 2009 9:45 pm

    [...] wrote in June about my DAW developing a chronic BSOD problem out of nowhere, and figuring out the problem was [...]

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