Amy
The blue screen of death indicates the likelihood of problems on your end. Using this platform is taxing your systems resources. When this happened more often in the past, at work we would ask the user a series of questions, often walking them through the steps. If you wish more help than just a list of to dos then, and don't have a whiz kid at home, PM me. What I am listing is basic housekeeping for your PC using Windows. I use XP2000 so the commands reflect that, but it is a good stable system despite being old, I run FireFox as my browser and OpenOffice for my word and data processing needs. No Microsoft..
First!!! Make sure your virus program is updating daily, that the subscription data is current. If it has lapsed, you may find yourself w/ virus, bots and who knows what sharing your resources. If you get Mail Failure Daemons for mail you have never sent, it is a good indicator of problems.
Second: make sure your Firewall is enabled, keeps out the folks you don't want as guests.
Then:
If you are on a newer system, it is likely that the system does most of its own housekeeping, but that is not always enough. So
Click on <Start> <all programs> <accessories> <System tools> then one of the following:
<disk cleanup. or disk <defragmenter>
Disk Clean up scans your disk calculating how much space you will be able to free up, the files it looks at are:
Download files, Temporary Internet files, Offline web pages, recycle bin, set up log files, Temporary files and others including compress old files. Of this short list I keep my download files intact, the rest I have checked for the Disk cleanup to handle. Even w/ the fact I do regular housekeeping, I should recover about 3 Megs from doing this. Since I am compressing it will be awhile before I can look at defragging.
Disk Defragmenter tidies how your files are stored, so as many as possible are stored, contiguously (lined up in order, memory units adjacent to each other on the disk.) This can take hours, and hours if it has never been done, or if the system is more than 75% defragmented, in which case, the defragmenter will not respond and professional help is advised. My dear SIL is using that situation to justify a new computer. A couple hundred $ for the comp doc is nothing, a new computer is $1500+ usually for me. If you haven't done this before, Expect to start it up and then do something else. I tend to defrag when I go to bed and let the machine put itself to bed.
Another advantage of getting the computer serviced if it is much more than 3 years old , they can clean up your registry which is kinda like the brain stem of the machine. A clean registry allows the programs to find their places and data, and not go down dead ends wasting time. I have a simple repair program I run every few months.
Hope this helps, I suspect once you are done you will be amazed at how well things go.