NEWS Microsoft has come up with a unique solution to the legendary 'blue screen of death' in the next version of its Windows operating system. With the release of Longhorn, the Redmond behemoth has added a red screen to face users when their system crashes.
According to Microsoft techie and blogger Michael Kaplan, who has been experimenting with a Longhorn beta, as well as being confronted with the blue screen of death, now users will also see red.
The red screen of death appears to be the bigger, badder cousin to the traditional blue screen and is designed to let users know that a more serious error has occurred, Kaplan said.
It's unlikely that the problem will affect many users of the next generation operating system. Kaplin, Microsoft's technical lead for globalisation infrastructure, fonts and tools, said that he had only achieved the red screen of death by making a "small set-up change" and altering the registry.
This "somewhat destructive act", said Kaplin, provoked a red screen of death after he rebooted Longhorn's virtual image, where previous versions of Windows returned a black screen with a different error message following the same treatment.
"I am not sure I would class the change as an improvement," Kaplin said.
Comments
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1. Bob Chapman
red...grr..angry...color of jam..hmmm..coincidence?
2. Nick Cole
Forcing users to see red! Now there is a novelty for Microsoft. So their in-house testers have only seen this once? Haven't we heard this or similar every time a new version comes out, yet they continually BSOD, which we will have to amend in our spell-checkers to RSOD?
I wonder how much time and money it cost to design this improvement? if only they produced some meaningful and human understandable diagnostic information that was actually indexed in Technet so that we as humble customers could diagnose and fix things ourselves instead, or is that too much to ask for. Somewhere in all the hundreds of MB on the CD there must be space for something legible.
3. Phil
So, the same logic that already runs through
most MS products is inherant in the...NEW OS!
You lucky people.
Mac user
4. anonymous
It seems to me, the color could be changed from 'blue' to whatever caught the user's fancy even in Windows 95, 98 ... so this certainly isn't a big deal.
5. Chuck Yfarley
How bad is a product when the biggest highlight is an error screen