I’m having one weird reproducible Windows 10 BSOD.

1. I have five monitors. When I’m doing translation work, I usually divide the main monitor in half, and then the left1 monitor in half in a 70% L, 30% R ratio. As I have to manually adjust the 70/30 split, the exact dividing line changes each time I do it. Almost all windows being split this way are Chrome windows in “Open a New Window” Chrome shortcut (it’s a neat setup that loses the address bar and tabs, and prevents new tabs from opening on it, pretty much behaving like an application window.

2. I use Win+Left, Win+Right to snap windows into the existing splits. However, for the 70/30 split, the snap only occurs when the last selected window in that screen was a window that was already part of a split. So if I click the 30% window sitting on the right, then select a normal chrome window floating in the middle of the screen, and press Win+Left, it will snap to the left 70% position. However, if the last window I selected before doing that was another normal window, it will not snap to 70% when I press Win+Left. It snaps to 50/50 and it even forgets the fact that the other windows were on 70/30 splits – in other words, once I’ve done this mistake, I can’t go back to selecting the 30% window, then select another window, and press Win+Left. That will still snap to the left 50%.

3. So each time I make this mistake and reset the split, I need to re-adjust the middle line and re-snap the windows. However, and here comes the BSOD – when I’m in the middle of this re-snap to 70/30 – eg I already did the split, moved the middle line to 70/30, selected the 30% window, and then select the window I want to re-snap – if I select a window that was already snapped to the left 50%, and press Win+Left, it doesn’t snap to 70%. It moves to the Left2 Monitor, to a right 50% position! And along with that move, Windows crashes, with the Blue Screen of Death. Interestingly, the center monitor (main monitor) shows BSOD. Left1 and Right monitors go black. However, Left2 and TopRight monitors stay alive, although they are unresponsive (I haven’t tested whether dynamic elements in the screen that don’t require user input do move, but I assume the screen is frozen). What’s interesting is that the dead monitors are hooked to the RTX 2070, and the alive ones are connected to the GTX710.

I had this happen twice in the same week, and now I know that this is a very specific sequence of event to trigger it. Both times the window being moved was a chrome window, but Windows freezing is annoying enough that I’m not gonna try to test if it happens with other applications.