News Windows Blue screen of death axed after 40 years, but BSOD still remains — will be replaced by new black Windows 11 'unexpected restart screen

[Admin]

After 40 years, Microsoft is replacing its iconic blue screen of death with a simpler black screen that displays the stop code and faulty driver error message.

Windows Blue screen of death axed after 40 years, but BSOD still remains — will be replaced by new black Windows 11 'unexpected restart screen : Read more

 

[Mindstab Thrull]

Anyone remember the old full-of-text white-on-blue BSOD screen from the pre-XP days that Windows 3.x and I think Win95 used? I wonder if that style might be more useful in general. The style that we have nowadays doesn't feel like it tells me much. Am I misremembering things? The OG ones certainly FELT more informative.

 

[philipemaciel]

It was much more informative. I see this as part of a general trend of dumbing down Windows - maybe even preparing us to face more BSODs (good thing we don’t need to change the abbreviation), as the overall code quality declines.

Anyone remember the old full-of-text white-on-blue BSOD screen from the pre-XP days that Windows 3.x and I think Win95 used? I wonder if that style might be more useful in general. The style that we have nowadays doesn't feel like it tells me much. Am I misremembering things? The OG ones certainly FELT more informative.

 

[mrdoc22]

Yes, the old in Win95 was much more informative about what when wrong.

I have a BSOD two weeks ago,
absolute no information, not even a stopcode, just text saying "a critical service could't start".

Had to Reinstall Windows 11 to get it to work again.

 

[abufrejoval]

Anyone remember the old full-of-text white-on-blue BSOD screen from the pre-XP days that Windows 3.x and I think Win95 used? I wonder if that style might be more useful in general. The style that we have nowadays doesn't feel like it tells me much. Am I misremembering things? The OG ones certainly FELT more informative.

Well, pre-XP would have meant Windows 2000, not Windows 3.x or Windows 95, which were DOS extenders. And those went down all the time...

And yes, NT 3.1, 3.5(1) and NT4 had white-on-blue text messages, which might have been a bit useful, had there been smartphone cameras or any other way to preserve their content.

If storage was still available after the crash, you could get crash data from a dump or the event log, but quite frankly I don't remember it being very helpful, ever.

But that could have been because you actually didn't see them all that often, unless there was something wrong with the hardware. And then what they said would be rather random.

There was a certain period in the NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 transition, especially with terminal servers, where the fact that device drivers had been moved into ring 0, caused issues because multi-processor machines became a thing at the same time and a lot of these drivers (mostly printers) were not thread safe.

But even then the error messages didn't really help identify the cause.

To be honest, the background color of these messages is about the least important or useful things to change or talk about: I really just don't want to see them, ever.

And thankfully, I very rarely do. And typically only, because I've let myself be tempted into some overclocking or undervolting, even if I knew better.

 

[Neilbob]

If I remember correctly, Windows 3.x tended to simply crash back to DOS, and that was it. And to be fair, that didn't happen all that frequently. Software programmers typically had a vested interest in making things as stable as possible by default (though not always), in the days before they could just push out an OS sized 'update' to fix issues later.

Releasing busted and affixing bandages after the fact is the new normal.

<cynicalgrump> As for the new Black Screen of Death, the colour blue likely requires too much storage space that is better used by Recall to store your personal information in as insecure a fashion as possible </cynicalgrump>

 

[KidHorn]

If I remember correctly, Windows 3.x tended to simply crash back to DOS, and that was it. And to be fair, that didn't happen all that frequently. Software programmers typically had a vested interest in making things as stable as possible by default (though not always), in the days before they could just push out an OS sized 'update' to fix issues later.

Releasing busted and affixing bandages after the fact is the new normal.

<cynicalgrump> As for the new Black Screen of Death, the colour blue likely requires too much storage space that is better used by Recall to store your personal information in as insecure a fashion as possible </cynicalgrump>

Windows 3.0 was launched from DOS. It was basically a DOS program and it had all the same limitations like 640kb of memory for each app. I think 3.1 moved away from that.

I can't upgrade to windows 11 because my computer doesn't support safe booting or something. I read about what I needed to change in BIOS, but when I made the change, the computer no longer recognized any of my hard drives. I tried a few things and gave up. I guess I'll be running 10 until I get a new motherboard.

 

[Mindstab Thrull]

Well, pre-XP would have meant Windows 2000, not Windows 3.x or Windows 95, which were DOS extenders. And those went down all the time...

Guess I should have been more specific: I was referring to versions of Windows, not necessarily operating systems I just remember that waaaay back in the day it was a block of white text on a blue background - like a WordPerfect document (does anyone still use that anymore? What a big deal it used to be, and now nobody's heard of it...).

 

[mrdoc22]

Guess I should have been more specific: I was referring to versions of Windows, not necessarily operating systems I just remember that waaaay back in the day it was a block of white text on a blue background - like a WordPerfect document (does anyone still use that anymore? What a big deal it used to be, and now nobody's heard of it...).

Back in old days you could actual use the lot of numbers,
there was in errortext, to find out what was the problem.

Now you just have to "reset" or "reinstall" Windows.

Microsoft says they are envolving Windows at BSOD with black background, just to please IT-cheifs.

(Windows 2000 is still the best version of Windows, it just ran)