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 ...