The infamous Blue Screen of Death — oft-shortened to BSOD — is changing, and many fans aren’t happy with its new look. While seeing the BSOD was never a good thing, the long-time version displayed a fair amount of information regarding the cause of the crash or error. And in a way, sentimentality also plays a role. The BSOD has been a part of Windows since 1990, although it has changed its look a couple of times over the years.
Now it looks like the BSOD is changing to the…well, the BSOD. The black screen of death. In Windows 11 24H2, the iconic frowning emoji is gone, replaced with a much more straightforward screen: a black background with the words, “Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart.” It has a progress counter beneath, and a few lines at the bottom detailing the stop codes as well as what failed.
It’s worth noting that some early builds of Windows 11 shipped with a black background versus a blue, but that wasn’t a true redesign. All it did was replace the blue background with black, rather than redesigning the entire screen.
Critics of the new version say it looks far too similar to the Windows update screen — also a black background with a short string of text and a progress counter — and that it doesn’t provide as much information about the error. The blue screen of death at least seemed apologetic, after all. More importantly, it provided a QR code users could scan to look up more information about the issue.
The change hasn’t taken hold for all users yet, and many in the Windows community hope Microsoft will take its reception into account and walk it back. Many argue that it poses a particular issue for IT and system administrators who won’t be able to address problems as easily due to the lack of information.
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