The Blue Screen of Death, also known as BSOD, is one of the longest-running problems in Windows and has been with us since Windows 3.1, when it was introduced into the Microsoft operating system to indicate that the computer has crashed and is no longer able to continue doing its job.
In recent months, Microsoft has made various changes to Windows 11 so that it cannot be installed on computers that are not officially supported, adding new hardware requirements without which the equipment may not function and which will be introduced with the release of the Windows 11 24H2 update before the end of the year, adding to others added at the beginning of 2024 (SSE4.2).
A little over a month ago, NVIDIA published an article on its website announcing the end of support for drivers on older computers that did not support the POPCNT instruction with the release of version 555 of its graphics card software.
If a user with a processor that does not support POPCNT and an NVIDIA graphics card installs a version equal to or later than version 555, the computer will display a blue screen of death with the error code SYSTEM THREAD EXCEPTION NOT HANDLEDIn principle, this should not be a problem for most users, as long as their computers are officially compatible with Windows 10 and/or Windows 11.
Unless the computer is managed by a processor Core 2 Duo Intel, it is very unlikely that your PC is experiencing this problem. If this is the case and you have a graphics card GTX 750i, GTX 950 or later and your computer is displaying the blue screen of death, you now know why. The easiest solution is to start your computer in safe mode, uninstall the latest NVIDIA update through the application and reinstall the previous version.
The NVIDIA application is responsible for analyzing the PC hardware to show if there are new updates available for it, so unless we have installed the latest version manually, we should not face this problem.
How to know if my PC supports the POPCNT instruction
As we have mentioned, the compatibility of processors with this instruction, which was released before SSE4.2, is limited to computers with the Core 2 Duo processor or lower. However, if you want to get rid of doubts and rule out that the problem may be caused by the NVIDIA driversbelow we show you how to clear up your doubts.
The first thing we need to do is download the Core Info application from this link. Next, unzip the downloaded file in .zip format and run the coreinfo.exe application from the command line (CMD or PowerShell without administrator permissions).
Next, we look for the POPCNT line and make sure that support for these instructions is shown as we can see in the image above.