Attention Windows 10 users There is another way to cause the blue screen of death

With the latest update, simply printing something can cause the device to crash Fortunately, there is a way around this and Microsoft seems to be working on a fix

The latest automatic security update, titled KB5000802 (OS Builds 19041867 and 19042867), was released on March 9 Because it was an automatic update, it appeared on users' devices without their knowledge and caused the devices to tilt in surprise when they tried to print a document

The specific apps used for printing do not seem to be the problem: there have been reports of BSODs in Notepad, Microsoft Office, etc

One account written by a CaffeinePizza user on the Reddit r/sysadmin page states that the problem was caused by the Kyocera Universal Print driver Several commenters stated that they experienced the same problem with Zebra and Ricoh printer drivers

According to CaffeinePizza, replacing it with Microsoft's basic PCL6 driver seems to be an effective solution, but this means forgoing the superior feature set of printer-specific drivers

SkillfulExpert, a user commenting on this thread who says he works for Microsoft, offers a more complicated fix if you are familiar with command prompt windows

Microsoft has acknowledged the problem and, as a Reddit user observed, has stopped rolling out KB5000802 to more devices The update's support page states, "After installing this update, some applications may display a blue screen with an APC_INDEX_MISMATCH error when attempting to print to certain printers"

"We are currently investigating and will provide an update as soon as more information becomes available

The obvious solution right now is to uninstall the latest build from your PC However, we do not recommend this Removing updates means removing important security updates as well, which exposes you to unnecessary risk If you can afford it, you may want to ride this out until Microsoft releases a fix

As an aside, if you are using Windows 11, you may have noticed that the blue screen of death has been replaced with a black one, but now Microsoft is bringing back BSOD to Windows 11