At least since the unveiling of Windows 11, it has been clear that Microsoft would like to add many new visual highlights to the new operating system. This fact is now being felt on a screen that many gamers are sure to know very well: The »Bluescreen of Death« or simply called »BSOD«.
In Windows 11 it is making a visual change, away from the Windows 10 color Caerulean – a mixture of Azure and dark sky blue – towards simple black. Why Microsoft decided to take this step is unclear.
You might want to create a consistent user experience because the boot and shutdown screens are also black, they suspect Colleagues from The Verge. The previous blue of the blue screen will thus be adopted into retirement. But what actually causes this message and why has it always been blue so far?
What causes a blue screen?
The kernel, i.e. the heart of the operating system, decides when and whether a blue screen appears. You can think of a blue screen as an emergency brake.
In certain situations, such as when a driver accesses unallocated memory, this is triggered preventively by the kernel in order to forestall more serious problems such as overwriting the data stored by the user.
In recent years, Microsoft has repeatedly made minor adjustments to give us helpful tips for troubleshooting problems via the blue screens, as you can read in this article:
more on the subject
Windows 10 developers are experimenting with QR codes for blue screens
Windows inherently “very stable”
David Plummer, a Microsoft developer who is also responsible for the Task Manager, emphasizes, however, that a blue screen is always only the last option for the system.
According to Plummer, Windows shipped versions are inherently very stable and he would never have seen a blue screen caused by Windows itself.
The problem is mostly device drivers. Until now, these often had the same permissions as the kernel. This means that any errors in these drivers were treated like kernel errors. Fortunately, Microsoft has recognized this problem and has removed more and more drivers from the kernel level over time.
Since printer drivers and sound cards were excluded from the kernel, the number of blue screens has decreased dramatically. On the other hand, some drivers have also been allowed access to the kernel over the years, for example systems connected to graphics card drivers in order to improve performance.
Why blue?
Link to YouTube content
David Plummer also provides an answer to this question (see the video linked above). The original creator of the blue screen, John Vert, was working on a MIPS RISC box, a very simple computer. Here the firmware showed consistently white text on a blue background.
So John Vert created the blue screen with exactly this scheme in order to create a user experience that was as consistent as possible. Surely he would never have dreamed that his blue screen would retain this structure for over 30 years.
How do you feel about the color changes of the blue screen and what experiences have you had with it in the past? Feel free to write it in the comments!
