How to survive the Windows 7 White Screen of Death (WSOD)

| April 24, 2012 | 0 Comments

Goodbye blue screen of death, welcome white screen of death! If you haven’t experienced it yet, consider yourself lucky. (It is annoying.) I get them when I use Outlook 2010 and I have a fast computer, or so I think. My laptop at home that gets the WSOD has 4 gigs of ram. My computer at work has 8 gigs of ram and I get the WSOD occasionally on that computer, too. I do not believe it’s caused by lack of memory. I have tried to troubleshoot this issue for months now and for the most part I have concluded that it’s pushing the bigger programs that are using Windows 7 to their max.

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Now, let’s begin with what the WSOD is.

Sometimes while working in the internet or especially in Outlook 2010, or just doing too many things at one time, your computer will start to look cloudy and everything you worked on looks transparent. The application you were working in is totally in a white screen of death mode and frozen up. If you go to the bottom tasks, you can usually continue to work in those, as they aren’t frozen up.

Do not start clicking, clicking and clicking in the white screen of death application. Clicking more only causes the computer to stay frozen or continue to white screen.  Your best recourse of action is to just let it ride out. If you don’t need the application and data you were working on (like internet surfing, etc), you can end the task in windows and re-open a new browser window, or do what I do (as I am very impatient!), open a new browser all together, such as Firefox or Chrome. If you do need the data you were working on, the best thing to do is just ride out the storm. Most of the time in Outlook 2010 it will figure itself out and be back to normal in a few minutes. If after five or ten minutes it’s still there, you probably have to hard crash it and the email you were scripting up may be in your drafts or might not be.

If you are getting these WSOD’s often within Outlook, you may want to book some time with me as I have a few setting changes that can help lift that problem, or your email folder size may be too large and you will need to slim it down a bit. The WSOD with Outlook can also come from IMAP settings. I love and adore IMAP, so I had to clean up a lot of my email that was synching with IMAP, works much better now.

What I have learned to do is change settings, clean up the computer more and delete and manage my email better.  For IE white screens, it is just using fewer tabs. All simple solutions to make the WSOD become less frequent.

If you are experiencing the WSOD and would like us to take a  look at it, call us at 612-865-4475 or send us an email – info@callthatgirl.biz.

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About the Author ()

Lisa Hendrickson is the owner of Call That Girl. She is an Outlook Expert and Microsoft 365 Consultant.

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