Blue screen of death

Blue screen of death (also known as the blue screen, bugcheck screen, or Stop error screen) is a common name for the screen that occurs during a system crash in Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is shown when the operating system can no longer function safely due to a fatal system error.

History
Contrary to popular belief, Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.x did not have a crash screen. When early Windows is run on a newer version of MS-DOS, it will print out an "Incorrect DOS version" error message, followed by garbled contents of the memory during the boot before loading into the Windows shell, which is often thought to be a crash screen, however, it is only a bug in the logo code. Whenever Windows did crash, it often resulted in a system hang or the shell returning back into DOS.

A modal dialog for displaying important system messages was first introduced in Windows 3.0 and was mostly used by virtual device drivers in 386 enhanced mode. This was a full screen message in text mode, which suspended Windows until being dismissed by the user. Initially, it used a black background, although Windows 3.1 later changed it to blue. The look of the modal dialog was virtually unchanged through the rest of the classic Windows series.

In Windows 3.x, this was mostly used in situations where a program couldn't continue running until the user resolved an issue, such as device conflicts or disk swaps. However, severe system errors still caused Windows to exit back to MS-DOS, similarly to the older versions. The interface was also used for a simple task manager in Windows 3.1, which could be invoked by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del while running Windows in the 386 enhanced mode. The task manager allowed the user to terminate an unresponsive program, or if there's no unresponsive programs, simply allow the user to exit the screen or press Ctrl + Alt + Del again to reboot the system. Steve Ballmer wrote the original message for the Task Manager warning.

Windows 95 used the modal dialogs to report severe system errors instead of exiting to DOS, which earned it the blue screen of death nickname. Windows 9x is unique in that it allows the user to continue after a system error, although it often resulted in an unstable system. The user interface was also used in early Windows 98 builds for ACPI subsystem errors, which notably used a red background instead of blue. Early builds of Windows Me briefly replaced the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" with blue screen modal dialog at one point.

Windows NT-based operating systems would introduce the STOP errors, with each STOP error providing a different code for the cause of the crash. Windows NT 3.1 up to Windows 2000 build 1773.1 would list the addresses of multiple drivers during the crash. From Windows 2000 build 1796.1 onwards, the message would be simplified to only include possible instructions for the user should they encounter the blue screen. The font would be slightly changed on Windows XP.

During the development of Windows 8, the blue screen has significantly changed. Around build 7850, the blue screen was updated to support higher resolutions using VBE 2.0 and anti-aliasing. At first, this updated blue screen only appeared if the system crashed at boot, however, by the time of build 7880 it was used for all bug checks. It would be quickly replaced to a more simplified black screen in build 7899, and would remain until build 8045 released with a black screen that would resemble the RTM. The black screen was changed back to the blue color in build 8102.

In Windows 10 version 1607, a QR code was added to the blue screen, linking to Microsoft's website for diagnosing blue screen errors. Windows 10 build 14993 changed the color and wording of the bug check screen to green for insider builds in order to be able to quickly distinguish between Insider and production build bug reports.

Implementation
In classic Windows, the blue screen is implemented by the  routine in the Shell VxD. The routine temporarily halts the system and then proceeds to tell the display driver to switch the display to text mode. It sets the background and foreground color, clears the screen and displays the message. It then waits for a valid keypress before switching back to graphics mode and resuming operation. On Windows 9x, it is most commonly called from  in , which displayed the infamous message about an exception that has occured.

The blue screen on NT-based systems is implemented in the  and   functions, which are contained in the kernel executable. The difference between the two functions is that the former accepts only the bugcheck code as an integer parameter, while the latter also accepts four more integers as bugcheck parameter codes, which can have different meaning depending on the bugcheck code. A component running in kernel mode can call either function to bring the system down in controlled manner if it detects a fatal uncorrectable error that can lead to data corruption. The respective function then takes care of switching to a compatible video mode, rendering the blue screen itself, saving a memory dump, and, if enabled, restarting the system.