After nearly 40 years, the iconic Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) in Windows is getting a major makeover. Microsoft confirmed that it’s overhauling the error message in Windows 11, and it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death (BSOD). The redesign swaps the familiar blue background, frowning face, and QR code for a simplified black screen.
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The new black screen will bear a resemblance to the black screen seen during Windows updates. However, it will now clearly display the stop code and the faulty system driver, information that wasn’t always readily available during a crash. This change aims to make it easier for IT administrators to diagnose problems without needing to extract crash dumps and analyse them with specialized tools like WinDbg.
“This is really an attempt on clarity and providing better information and allowing us and customers to really get to what the core of the issue is so we can fix it faster,” says David Weston, Vice President of Enterprise and OS Security at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. “Part of it is just cleaner information on what exactly went wrong, where it’s Windows versus a component.”
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Microsoft plans to roll out this new BSOD design in a Windows 11 update “later this summer,” alongside its new Quick Machine Recovery feature. This recovery tool is designed to quickly restore machines that fail to boot. These changes to the BSOD are part of a broader effort by Microsoft to enhance Windows’ resiliency, particularly after last year’s CrowdStrike incident, which caused millions of Windows machines to experience BSOD errors.
