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The infamous Blue Screen of Death feels like it’s always there, waiting. The scourge of PC gamers and IT workers alike, it lurks in the distance, seemingly anticipating the right moment to ruin your day. Now Microsoft has announced that it’s previewing a “more streamlined UI for unexpected restarts” in the latest Windows Insider build—and there are rumblings of a new Black Screen of Death to keep me awake at night.
Microsoft’s Windows Insider blog lists a number of changes coming to Preview Build 26120.3653 (KB5053658), including changes to the UI for teeth-clenching system crashes. Or, as MS prefers to call them in this case, “unexpected restarts”:
“We’re previewing a new, more streamlined UI for unexpected restarts which better aligns with Windows 11 design principles and supports our goal of getting users back into productivity as fast as possible. We’ve simplified your experience while preserving the technical information on the screen.
“As a reminder, for Windows Insiders this appears as a “green screen”. This is beginning to roll out to Windows Insiders on Windows 11, version 24H2 and higher in the Beta, Dev, and Canary Channels.”
Windows Latest, however, reports that Microsoft has redesigned the Blue Screen of Death and replaced it with a Black Screen of Death. While it’s not clear where Windows Latest is getting its information from, the example screenshots show what looks to be a near-identical error message screen, only this time completely and utterly black.
Black like my soul. Black like the infinitesimal reaches of deep space. Black, like my mood when my PC crashes from some thinly-described error that now appears to no longer show a QR code for easy crash lookups. There’s not even a sad face emoji to mirror my internal strife, it appears. Just an ominous void, a stop code, and the message that haunts every PC gamer’s dreams at night.
“Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart.”
It is simpler, I suppose. But there’s a starkness to the idea of your PC crashing because of a fundamental error that isn’t replicated by other messages. If a game crashes, back to the Windows desktop you go. If the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, however, it looks like you’re now going to be shown a glimpse into the void that exists where your PC’s operating system once was, and I am not a fan.
It doesn’t help that a BSOD system crash is often accompanied by an audio blip that makes you jump out of your seat. The whole thing seems designed to cause a jump scare, inevitably followed by a period of diagnosis that begins with a reset and crossed fingers that your system doesn’t immediately blue screen (now potentially black screen) loop into infinity.
Like the infamous Crowdstrike outage, which managed to take down a considerable amount of infrastructure worldwide. I’m not sure a black screen over a blue screen would have made things any better, but perhaps the error messages themselves will eventually become more useful on the new page, QR-codeless as they currently appear to be.
Still, here we are. I’m certainly not going to force my system into a blue screen/black screen scenario to test it. Instead I shall install the preview build, and let it lay in wait. The void. It comes for us all eventually, it seems.
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Kurt Indovina
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