The possible death of blue screen of death

real_aurgathor

Looks like the blue screen of death may be on its deathbed since it’s black in the latest preview version of Win11. The good news is that BSOD will still be valid, but with the new meaning of “Black Screen Of Death”.

Of course another possibility is that this change is not a feature, but a bug that will be fixed.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/microsoft-kills-the-iconic-blue-screen-of-death-it-looks-like-this-now/ar-AA1C0QMm?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=11362c39dc1b4d25b8064f6a69e0883b&ei=9

OmegaWolf747

Hmph! Talk about putting makeup on a pig! Why doesn’t MS work on improving their OS code so that these errors just don’t happen in the first place?!

takeahike

OmegaWolf747 Hmph! Talk about putting makeup on a pig! Why doesn’t MS work on improving their OS code so that these errors just don’t happen in the first place?!

Never one to stick up for MS, I hate to have to say that although it seems to have taken a mere 35 years since Windows 3.0 at least in my experience they have pretty much finally gotten to the point of virtually eliminating them with Windows 11, with probably the most improvement with the most recent versions of 22H2 and 23H2. This is still not to say that Windows does not still in many ways need improvement, although I make no claim that I could do any better. See here.

vabello

OmegaWolf747 Most of these crashes aren’t caused by Microsoft code and are exceeding rare anymore.

real_aurgathor

OmegaWolf747 Why doesn’t MS work on improving their OS code so that these errors just don’t happen in the first place?!

As it was already mentioned, some (many?) of these errors originate in 3rd party code – a recent, very famous example of that that would be CrowdStrike’s clown strike.
Another source of BSODs are hardware (often memory and storage) errors – there is no simple answer on how to deal with those
Given the repercussions, it’s often better to throw a BSOD than trying to recover from the error causing it. (unless, for example, it’s a repeated BSOD during boot, in which case the OS should try to go back to the last known good configuration)

Some time ago I read a highly technical white paper on why MS can’t totally get rid of BSODs, and why letting it crash is better than attempting a recovery – that would be a supporting argument behind #3. I’ll look into if I can find it.

telcodad

takeahike Never one to stick up for MS, I hate to have to say that although it seems to have taken a mere 35 years since Windows 3.0 at least in my experience they have pretty much finally gotten to the point of virtually eliminating them with Windows 11, with probably the most improvement with the most recent versions of 22H2 and 23H2.

I must say that from Windows XP on I don’t remember getting any BSODs at all.

The most that seems happen now is that a particular app/window will suddenly disappear (i.e. crash) and I will have to restart that app again.

takeahike

telcodad I must say that from Windows XP on I don’t remember getting any BSODs at all.

XP, and of course its forerunners NT and 2000, was of course better than the 95, 98 and Me systems that still had 16-bit code mixed in by leaps and bounds, but in my memory there were still blue screens here and there and all the way though to 7 and to some extent maybe even 10 (never used 8, 8.1). NT and its progeny was straight 32-bit code that apparently made all the difference. Again, even some with 10 but at least as far as I perceive 11 is the best for not having that and substantially improved stability IMO, and this is so IMO despite the general perception that 11 is just 10 with some better lipstick. I did have a couple of 11 blue screens a couple of months ago that I posted about here but as I said there it was the first time in years and apparently has been resolved with subsequent updates with nothing like that happening for me since then. Here’s one type that wasn’t out of the question for 7.

PL1

takeahike I did have a couple of 11 blue screens a couple of months ago

I had a couple of BOSDs on one of my Win11 24H2 systems recently. I used Nirsoft’s Blue Screen View to find out what was up. It pointed to my Intel network driver. The last network driver posted to Asus was an old driver that could not get past the “Microsoft Vulnerable Driver List”. Once I finally figured out that Intel had the update I needed, all has been well. (Knock on Wood!) I do sort of blame Windows 11 on this one though, since the update was never offered. And in the past, I always thought the latest update would be from the motherboard manufacturer. But, I can’t really blame Win11 for throwing a BSOD for an unsupported driver. Finding the culprit is the hard part!

takeahike

PL1
I had a similar thing happen with 11 on my laptop–it’s admittedly unsupported with 11 on it with the Rufus bypass (but so what?). After an 11 update the keyboard would no longer work, saying that the driver was discarded with some sort of language like it had committed some sort of crime! I can’t imagine why this would be such an issue and disabled updates for a while after reverting back from that update that BTW actually worked and so I could use it until I got the idea of just cloning my current desktop install (whose hardware is actually even older yet still unaffected) and which was originally the old laptop setup from an earlier desktop install, and the clone from this current desktop install solved the problem, including even an 11 update since then. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I don’t use the laptop much but despite it being slow as molasses even with 12 GB RAM and an SSD I need it sometimes for travel. I generally just use it for streaming music in my family room per this arrangement, generally using my desktop that is reasonably fast.

PL1

takeahike it’s admittedly unsupported with 11 on it with the Rufus bypass (but so what?).

I should have mentioned that. My install was also done with Rufus, on an unsupported CPU as well. I have no idea WHY it is unsupported since it is an I7-7700K 4.2GHz processor. Its base speed is faster than most of the current generations’ base speeds. It passes EVERY Win11 test besides the CPU age. (My I9-12900K is only 3.2GHz with Turbo Boosts up to 5.2GHz.)

takeahike

PL1 I have no idea WHY it is unsupported since it is an I7-7700K 4.2GHz processor. Its base speed is faster than most of the current generations’ base speeds.

They want you to needlessly dump it in a landfill so you have to buy a new system from which they will collect yet another Windows 11 license fee. 🤢💩🤮 You ready to file the lawsuit? I am. See here and here.

dave

real_aurgathor

#3 is easy. You crash because the system is operating outside its design parameters, and you therefore can make no assumptions about what still works. Crashing is better than risking the corruption of user data.

Example - one rule in many OS designs is that you can’t service a page fault when running above a certain interrupt priority. The reasons why that is might be too involved for this forum. Kernel code must be written to adhere to the rules. So if you do take a fault, the system is already badly broken. The prudent thing to do is to crash before worse things happen. The decision to crash is explicitly coded - as a defensive measure.

Pretty much all operating systems have this sort of feature, whether they’re called bugchecks, stopcodes, kernel panics, or whatever.