Microsoft® Windows® Internals: Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000, 4th Edition
by Mark E. Russinovich, David A. Solomon
Why Does Windows Crash?
Windows crashes (stops execution and displays the blue screen) for the following reasons:
A device driver or an operating system function running in kernel mode incurs an unhandled exception, such as a memory access violation (which is caused either by attempting to write to a read-only page or attempting to read an address that isn't currently mapped and therefore is not a valid memory location).
A call to a kernel support routine results in a reschedule, such as waiting for an unsignaled dispatcher object when the interrupt request level (IRQL) is DPC/dispatch level or higher. (See Chapter 3 for details on IRQLs.)
A page fault on memory backed by data in a paging file or a memory mapped file occurs at an IRQL of DPC/dispatch ...
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