What Is the Blue Screen of Death?

Blue screen of death refers to a screen image of white text on a blue background displayed by Microsoft Windows operating system when it cannot recover from a system error.

Blue screen of death

Blue screen of death

Blue screens happening in different versions of Windows

In Windows XP, there is no blue screen of death when the program has minor problems, only the "Program Error" screen appears. The picture shows the error message displayed on an LED screen in Victoria Park, Hong Kong

By default, the blue screen of death display is blue (0x01 or # 0000AA) and white (0x0F or #FFFFFF) characters. The displayed information includes the current memory value and the register value. Microsoft also added with humor a system.ini tool that allows users to modify the settings of the blue screen of death.

Blue screen of death has rarely appeared on Windows NT, 2000 and XP. When minor software errors occur, although the program may still crash, due to better memory management in the new system, similar errors will not harm the entire operating system. In these systems, the "real" blue screen of death only appears when the entire operating system crashes.

Blue screen of death first appeared in Windows 2.0. In addition, the screen that appears on the Microsoft game console XBOX is not blue, but green. In XP / Vista / 7, there is a more severe red screen of death than a blue screen, which is often caused by driver failure. ^[2]