Microsoft has already confirmed that it will soon be retiring the iconic system alert, the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), after nearly four decades. The company, as per a report by The Verge, has confirmed that the error screen which is known for highlighting system crashes and technical woes, will now become the Black Screen of Death, bringing a new visual identity and clearer diagnostics to Windows 11.
As the name suggests, the redesigned BSOD ditches the blue background, sad face emoji, and QR code in favour of a cleaner, black interface after almost 40 years. Unlike previous iterations, the updated screen will offer a clear display with the stop code and highlight the faulty system driver behind the crash. In simpler terms, the admins may no longer need to extract crash dump files and run through tools like WinDbg just to get to the root cause.
“This is really an attempt at clarity and providing better information… so we can fix it faster. Part of it is just cleaner information on what exactly went wrong — whether it’s Windows itself or a component,” said David Weston, Vice President of Enterprise and OS Security at Microsoft as quoted by The Verge.
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Speaking of the rollout, the report stated that the new Black Screen of Death will make its debut later this summer as part of a wider update to Windows 11. It will also introduce Quick Machine Recovery, a feature designed to rapidly restore unbootable PCs. All this comes after last year’s major CrowdStrike-related outage, which saw millions of Windows machines crash to a BSOD due to a faulty update.
It is worth noting that this not just a rebrand and it will improve the system transparency and reduce downtime.