After 40 Years, Microsoft Is Reskinning the BSOD, and Hopefully Making It More Helpful
Microsoft has announced that it's changing the iconic Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and adding more information for administrations trying to troubleshoot an error. Although Microsoft has tried something like this before, this time it's going to stick, it claims, with plans to roll out the change to all Windows 11 machines toward the end of the year.
The humble BSOD has been with us since the very early days of Windows. In Windows 1.0, if you loaded it with the wrong version of DOS, it would flash up a blue screen telling you as such. It's remained in some form or another throughout almost every version of Windows since, and is still there in Windows 11 if a driver goes wrong or there's some kind of kernel error. After the CrowdStrike incident last year , though, when millions of PCs were stuck booting to a BSOD, only to do it again on a reboot, Microsoft is pushing to improve on the iconic help screen. It announced changed earlier this year, though you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a joke .
The new screen will be clearer and look more like other Windows setup screens.Credit: Microsoft
The first and most obvious change is the look. Instead of a blue backdrop, the BSOD will instead have a black background. At least calling it the Black Screen of Death means we don't need to change the acronym.
The new black screen will look quite different, though. Ditching the QR code and opaque error messaging, the new BSOD will look more like the screen you see when you're installing Windows or recovering from a boot error. It'll give a clear error stop code for those trying to fix the issue, as well as an indication of what caused the problem. It'll then attempt a fix automatically, with a percentage progress hinting at how long it might take.
This sad face has been haunting system admins for years.Credit: Microsoft
That should make it easier for people to fix whatever the problem was, or at least more readily convey the issue to someone who can.
"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 a chat with The Verge . "Part of it just cleaner information on what exactly went wrong, where it's Windows versus a component."
The new BSOD will roll out to all Windows 11 PCs later this summer, we're told. It'll join a number of new features that Microsoft hopes will make the OS more reliable and easier to recover when things go wrong. Its Quick Machine Recovery feature, for example, will try to leverage the cloud to replace problematic files for PCs that can't boot to Windows.
