Windows 8 new Blue Screen New sad face

Windows 8 is sporting a new Blue Screen of Death. The sweeter, friendlier version features a sad face emoticon and plain language error explanations.

The Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) has always been a screen we dread to see. It’s blue, of course, and usually filled with lots of text telling you about the crash your operating system just experienced. To 99% of people viewing it, it makes absolutely no sense and is dismissed with a mandatory reboot.

The BSoD has been included with every version of Windows I have ever owned, and I think I’ve seen it appear on every Windows system I’ve used in anger. But for Windows 8 we were expecting it to disappear, replaced by a Black Screen of Death.

With the unveiling of Windows 8 yesterday at the Build conference, that turns out not to be the case, but the BSoD has at least had a major revamp.

As you can see in the images above, the uninformative page of text has gone. Instead you get a sad face depicted in text characters followed by a message telling you your PC couldn’t handle a problem.

A reboot is going to happen at this point, but if you want to find out what caused the problem you need to write down or remember the search term it presents you with. The two search terms I have seen suggested so far are “System Service Exception” and “HAL Installation Failed.” I doubt either will return that much useful information as they are both quite generic terms. While it’s nice not to have to look at a blue screen full of text, it’s a shame Microsoft still hasn’t found a way to refine the error reporting process further and present users with a very clear description of why Windows 8 fell down.