Blank screen on Laptop?

Blank blue/black screen on Gateway laptop?

• Okay, often when I'm on my laptop my screen sometimes flicker only once and while I'm using the internet it flickers like a double screen. Sometimes the screen will go just go to a blank black screen this happened about four times and just now I was on yahoo! news and the screen flickered and went blue. I reset it and it started again with no problem but I don't know why it's doing it? Do I need to take it in to have it looked at? I've done a virus scan 2 days ago and it found nothing and I haven't used since besides today. My laptop is about 4 to 5 years old and I use it for work and writing. I don't want to lose anything if it ends up crashing.

• Answer:

  If you don't want to lose anything when it crashes then you should be making backups of your files. BSOD (Blue Scree of Death) can be due to several reasons: 1. Bad or failing hardware Solution: remove whatever you attached very recently for the meantime and observe. 2. Bad device driver Solution: use updated drivers for the right hardware. 3. Corrupted operating system Solution: reset to factory defaults or do a clean install of the OS, drivers and then reinstall applications 4. Corrupted software Solution: reinstall the affected software. 5. Malware infection Solution: scan with a decent and reputable antivirus and anti-spyware. Try to eliminate all those possibilities one at a time. In most cases, the BSOD gives an STOP error code which can be used as a hint on what caused it. Google for that STOP error code.