Blue Screen of Death on Windows

EDIT: It actually worked!? I was struggling so hard with this, trying absolutely everything under the sun, and just when I ran out of ideas, I decided to write this post. Then, almost immediately after posting, it’s like I jinxed myself or something—suddenly the desktop appeared and now everything is running fine. WTF!? From what I can tell, I don't have the permissions to delete this thread myself, so if a moderator could wipe it, or if anyone knows what happened so I can fix it if it happens again, please let me know.

Help! I was playing Grand Theft Auto V, minimized the game to check something online, and when I switched back, I was greeted by a Blue Screen of Death. Well, not even a blue screen, just a total black screen. I could see my mouse cursor and move it around, but nothing else responded. I assumed the game had just frozen, so I did a hard shutdown on my laptop, but when I tried to reboot, I just got stuck on the Windows logo. Nothing else happens. I couldn't even get into Windows at all.

The first time this happened, I was so stressed out that I just started mashing every F-key on my keyboard while Windows was booting because I honestly didn't know how to trigger Safe Mode. Eventually, I managed to hit that recovery screen, enabled Safe Mode, and the laptop rebooted. But even in Safe Mode, the same issue persisted: black screen, I could move the mouse, and I could see the "Safe Mode" text in the four corners, but it would flicker in and out of existence. After that, I restarted again, and now I can't even get into Safe Mode anymore. No matter what keys I press, it just hangs on the Windows logo and won't even show the mouse pointer.

PS. Since I see people mentioning malware links, my brother gave me a USB drive yesterday to transfer some files, and it turned out his drive was infected—Windows Defender was throwing a fit about it—so there might be a connection there. But how am I supposed to fix it if I can't even boot into Windows!?

Once you've booted into Safe Mode, just hit Win + R and type explorer.exe into the box. Make sure you don't include that final period—you really only need what comes after explorer.

And here we go again. 😁 Hopefully, I managed to fix it this time around. The problem is, nothing responds to any input. I haven't even tried Win + R because it won't even pull up Task Manager or anything else—it’s just completely dead. As I mentioned before, it won't even let me boot into Safe Mode; the moment I turn it on, the Windows logo flashes for a split second and then it's just a black screen. Last time, it eventually kicked itself back to life after sitting there frozen for a few minutes, so I'll just let it sit for a bit and see what happens.

Why does this keep happening? It’s honestly mind-boggling that you can't even minimize a game without 😠 crashing. How does Microsoft allow software to be this broken? It’s an absolute disgrace for paid software. Am I really supposed to pay for this junk? To have the whole system give up on me just because I tried to minimize a game?

EDIT: Alright, it's back. After a few restarts and a little aggressive tapping on the keyboard, it finally booted up. 😁 At first, the colors looked weird and the login background was off, which actually spooked me into thinking my settings had been wiped, but everything snapped back to normal immediately after I logged in.

What kind of temperatures are you seeing over there?

That’s not actually the issue here. I took the laptop to an authorized service center on Thursday—I couldn't touch the internals myself because I didn't want to void the warranty—and they replaced the thermal paste on both the CPU and GPU and cleared out all the dust. It’s running much better now. Before the cleaning, I was definitely seeing issues, though it wasn't crashing the game or Windows itself. The performance would just tank after a while with massive FPS drops. I ran some tests using FurMark GPU and Prime95 CPU, and it turned out my CPU was hitting 99°C and the GPU was hitting 81°C. Both were throttling aggressively; the CPU would dip below 2 GHz at times, and the GPU core frequency would plummet from over 1000 MHz to under 500 MHz. Now that it's been cleaned, the GPU hits about 79°C but won't go higher and isn't throttling anymore (it stays steady north of 1000 MHz), and the CPU tops out at 92°C, usually hovering between 80-90°C under full load. It still throttles, but way less frequently. It can hold its base clock of 2.6 GHz even at 100% utilization without any trouble, though it can't sustain Turbo mode (3.2 GHz) for very long—but honestly, it behaved the exact same way when it was brand new. It stays in Turbo mode until the load gets heavy. As soon as things get intense, it drops back down to 2.6 GHz, which is probably just reacting to the heat since this isn't exactly a high-end gaming rig with a massive cooling solution.

Also, this mostly happens when I minimize the game and then alt-tab back in, and even then, it doesn't happen every single time. If heat were the culprit, it would be happening continuously during gameplay, but I played for hours yesterday without a single hiccup. I used to run into this same headache with GTA IV; I’d minimize the game, try to switch back, and everything would just freeze. Sometimes I could kill the process via Task Manager, but other times I had to just force a hard reboot on the laptop, and then it would work fine once I restarted.