Blue screen of death

[4] This was retained in the final release (version 1.01); however it mostly prints out random characters instead due to the remaining text messages being removed during development.

Windows 3.0 uses a text-mode screen for displaying important system messages, usually from digital device drivers in 386 Enhanced Mode or other situations where a program could not run.

It also displays a blue screen when the user presses the Ctrl+Alt+Delete key combination to bring up a rudimentary task manager, reserved for quitting any unresponsive programs if they are available.

[8] On September 4, 2014, several online journals such as Business Insider,[9] DailyTech,[10] Engadget,[11] Gizmodo,[12] Lifehacker,[13] Neowin,[14] Softpedia,[15] TechSpot,[16] Boy Genius Report (BGR), The Register,[17] and The Verge,[18] as well as print and non-English sources like PC Authority and Austrian tech site FutureZone[19] all attributed the creation of the Blue Screen of Death to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's former CEO.

Their articles cited a blog post by Microsoft employee Raymond Chen entitled "Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1?

According to his post, he was scathing on his evaluation of major tech news sites that had picked up on the incorrect story and performed poor or non-existent research that demonstrated complete ignorance of his original account.

He indicated that, in addition to the faulty base story, over half a dozen significant sites had included other embellished or invented details in their stories, including incorrectly naming Chen as a Microsoft executive, treating Chen as an "official company spokesperson", and using unrelated images from Windows NT or Windows 95 as illustrations.

In addition, he also pointed out a very special mention for the worst single distortion out of any misinformations, which belonged to BGR (Boy Genius Report), who "fabricated a scenario and posited it as real" in a rhetorical question to readers.

[21] A day after his initial complaint, Chen would follow this up with another blog post on September 10, 2014, claiming responsibility for revising the BSoD in Windows 95.

[23] Additionally, Vert has also stated that the reason why stop error screens were colored blue was because the universal color palette of the video hardware at that time was very rudimentary, and he personally used a MIPS OS box and SlickEdit for programming so that both the firmware and editor displayed white text on a blue background, making for a more consistent programming experience.

In the Windows NT family of operating systems, the blue screen of death (referred to as "bug check" in the Windows software development kit and driver development kit documentation) occurs when the kernel or a driver running in kernel mode encounters an error from which it cannot recover.

Depending on the OS version, there may be several formats this can be saved in, ranging from a 64kB "minidump" (introduced in Windows 2000) to a "complete dump" which is effectively a copy of the entire contents of physical memory (RAM).

This happens only when the computer has a function called "Auto Restart" enabled, which can be disabled in the Control Panel which in turn shows the stop error.

Since the system is unable to boot from the hard drive in this situation, correction of the problem often requires using the repair tools found on the Windows installation disc.

In addition, the error screens showed four paragraphs of general explanation and advice and may have included other technical data such the file name of the culprit and memory addresses.

The Windows 9x line of operating systems used the Blue Screen of Death as the main way for virtual device drivers to report errors to the user.

The most common BSoD is displayed on an 80×25 text-mode screen, which is the operating system's way of reporting an interrupt caused by a processor exception; it is a more serious form of the general protection fault dialog boxes.

In reality, however, they are reserved device names for DOS systems; attempting to access them from Windows causes a crash, which in turn brings up said BSoD.

Beta versions of Windows 98 display a red error screen raised by the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) when the host computer's BIOS encounters a problem.

[43] The bootloader of the first beta version of Windows Vista originally displayed a red screen background in the event of a boot failure.

The Blue Screen of Death on Windows Me .
"Blue screen" on Windows 1.01
The Windows 1.01 and 2.03 boot screens running on an incorrect DOS version, featuring random characters .
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The original Blue Screen of Death (here seen in the Italian edition of Windows NT 3.51 ) first appeared in Windows NT 3.1 .
The rudimentary task manager screen from Windows 3.1x , which was often confused with the Blue Screen of Death due to its similarities.
The Blue Screen of Death on Windows XP , Windows Vista and Windows 7 , without performing a memory dump.
The Blue Screen of Death in Windows 9x , as it appears on Windows 95 and Windows 98 .
The Blue Screen of Death on ReactOS , similar to that found in Windows XP up to Windows 7. Note the usage of a different font compared to its contemporary Windows versions.
The Red Screen of Death in Windows Longhorn build 5048. Note the word "execution" is misspelt as "exectuion", which would be fixed in the later builds.