Method 1 — Read it straight off the crash screen

1. When the blue/black screen appears, look at the screen carefully — there’s a sad face 🙁 at the top and a paragraph of text below it.
2. Near the bottom of that text block, find the line “Stop code:” — the word(s) right after it (e.g. DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL) is what you type into the search box below.
3. If a QR code is shown, ignore it — it just links to a generic support page, it won’t tell you the actual code.
4. Take a photo with your phone if the screen disappears quickly — it usually stays for 5–10 seconds before restarting.

Method 2 — Find it after Windows restarts (Reliability Monitor)

This works even if you already missed the blue screen — no settings changes needed.

1. Click the search icon in the taskbar (or press the Windows key) and type reliability
2. Open “View reliability history” from the results
3. Look for a red ✕ icon on the date your PC crashed, under “Critical Events”
4. Click that date, then click on the specific crash entry in the list below the graph to expand it
5. Look for a line that says “Bug check code” — the number next to it (e.g. 0x0000007b) is your stop code. Click “View technical details” or “Copy to clipboard” if you don’t see it right away.

Method 3 — Find it in Event Viewer

1. Search for event viewer in the taskbar search and open it
2. In the left pane, expand Windows Logs and click System
3. In the right pane, click Find… and search for BugCheck
4. Open the matching entry (usually Event ID 1001, source “BugCheck”) — the stop code is the first value listed, right after the words “The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck”

If the screen keeps vanishing too fast for Method 1

1. Search advanced system settings in the taskbar and open “View advanced system settings”
2. Go to the Advanced tab → Startup and Recovery → Settings
3. Untick “Automatically restart” under System failure, then click OK
4. Next time it crashes, the screen will stay until you manually restart, giving you time to read or photograph it

Getting the exact cause from a minidump

Every crash writes a small log file to C:\Windows\Minidump. It names the specific driver file that caused the crash — far more precise than the stop code alone.

1. Download a free reader like WhoCrashed or BlueScreenView (NirSoft), or use Microsoft’s own WinDbg (from the Microsoft Store).
2. Open the tool — it scans the Minidump folder automatically.
3. Look for the line naming the “caused by driver” — usually a .sys file. Search that filename online to identify which program or hardware it belongs to.
4. Update, roll back, or uninstall whatever owns that driver.

Booting into Safe Mode

Several fixes below need Safe Mode, which loads Windows with only essential drivers — useful when a driver is crashing the system before you can fix it normally.

1. Hold Shift and click Restart from the Start menu (or Sign-in screen).
2. Choose Troubleshoot → Advanced options → Startup Settings → Restart.
3. After restart, press 4 or F4 for Safe Mode, or 5 / F5 for Safe Mode with Networking (needed if you’re downloading a driver).

If Windows won’t boot far enough to reach the Start menu, interrupt the boot twice (hold the power button to force shutdown during startup, twice) to trigger Automatic Repair, then follow the same Troubleshoot path.