Here’s the new Blue Screen of Death in Windows 8, which Microsoft is previewing this week at its Build conference.
It’s been transformed into a sad face emoticon.
Reminds me of the old Happy Mac but, well, sadder.
Bigger version after the jump.
Via Arnold Kim’s Twitter stream.
The big version is here.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
94 responses to “Check Out The New Blue Screen of Death In Windows 8”
LOL… Windows trademark Blue Screen of Death… This is the new Windows 8 version!
Blue Screen Metro style! yeah!
…if it just needs a restart, its not a screen “of death”. its more the blue screen of minor annoyance. when things actually break and you cant used them (xbox red ring) thats when its an Of Death. Just saying…
Blue Face of Death!
http://tinyurl.com/3doymjf
No need to feel so special, guess you guys forgot that Mac’s have a thing called a “kernel panic”: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS…
(and I’m posting this comment from a Mac. That has has its fair share of kernel panics, thank you very much.)
Honestly, I miss the sad mac most of all.
Do you really know what is a BSOD?
I don’t think the “cute” emoticon dampens any feelings of rage one experiences upon sighting the error message…
I actually quite like the look of this screen…….. though I’m sure when I actually get it I won’t have that feeling.
Better than a kernel panic with the gray curtain of death that makes your heart sink down with it.
A picture of the “Death Star” with Darth Vader saying “Join me my son “would have been more appropriate.
Notice the subline of the error states “hal failed to load” HAL !
The language is terrible! My God, could they have worded it any worse? In one short statement they say (in essence) your PC is ineffective, useless, incapable, not a great way to instil confidence in a bit of kit. I’m sure it could have been worded significantly better. Here’s hoping the PC crowd don’t get to see this drivel too often, or they may need counselling.
shouldn’t they put more effort into helping pc’s not crash, rather than designing fancy new blue screens?
There will be many changes before it is released.
This is a preview.
I’m not sure that “your PC ran into a problem it could not handle” is correct. Far better to say “Windows collapsed in a useless heap and needs to restart”
Agree.
My W7 has only blue screened once – when months ago trying out new USB3 hardware – because the drivers were not release candidates and only beta.
This is way different from the days of NT, W2000.
I agree, all you need to do is take away the offending new hardware and restart.
If that doesn’t do it, the restore choices work fine for me.
I do hear tell though that Apples don’t ever crash, even when previewing…. :-)
HAL meaning the Hardware Abstraction Layer, in case you didn’t know :)
I did get the reference to the HAL voice from Windows though.
I’ve not seen one of those in a long time, or he “bomb” that used to be displayed in OS 7.
Use Apple at home, Windows at work. It has been years since I’ve seen a true BSOD on either system.
Been using Windows 7 for over 2 years now with not 1 BOD. In fact, in the ten years I ran XP, I had only 1 BOD and it was my fault. It may be fun to poke fun at Windows, but you Apple fan boys are lying through your teeth if you say the MAC OS has no problems. My brother runs MAC and I get to hear about all of them. Also doesn’t take much of a Google search to find a bunch of OSX issues. Just sayin’
That picture above looks pretty damned photoshopped to me. How come the BOD is in such great focus, while the white bar above it on the same screen is in such poor focus? Whoever photoshopped it did a piss poor job. The lettering and sad face are all stretched and out of proportion on the large picture. Epic Fail just to make fun of Windows…….
To be honest, Windows doesn’t crash anymore as far as I hear.
But don’t get fooled,
its still a pain to configure and try to make things work in it.
The usual crap you have to deal with Windows just to make it work, is
still true. I get white hair trying to figure my family’s PC’s
from 2009 using win 7 i only had BSODs for bad drivers by ati and for hardware failures…
Mac, PC…they’re all great when they work properly and make you want to shoot them when they don’t. I’ve owned computers running 95, 98, ME, XP, 7, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion…they all have their strong points and weaknesses. Well, not ME, that was just one giant weakness. I’ll give PC this though, it is a lot easier to steal software for it. Good for poor people, bad for businesses.
I never had a blue screen in Windows 7, Vista and XP. Users who have blue screens don’t know how to use a computer. I’m a hardcore Windows user and I do really mutch thinks with this OS.
This is freakin’ hilarious.
Hmmm… Now that’s something that’s not ‘Apple-like’ :-)
I wonder how many people commenting forgot that this was a dev build and not the fully ready yet?
I’m guessing few
I wonder how many people don’t realize that it’s photoshopped bullshit? Poorly photoshopped bullshit.
“But behind the shiny bubble – it’s still windows.”
They may also have bad hardware.
No, it’s not. Microsoft itself showed it.
Oh well… so nothing has changed for MerdaSoft.
Where? All I’ve found so far is people using Arnold Kim’s faked twitter pic….
its not photoshopped… its the windows development preview released today. The error is coming while installation in VMware. try it yourself.. stupid
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u…
At the build conference: http://www.geek.com/articles/g…
“I never had a blue screen in Windows 7, Vista and XP. Utter BullCrap
Yeah, Beautiful :p
No battlefield 3 or skyrim for mac. that alone is a reason never to buy one.
I recently switched from Win 7 to Lion, and trust me Lion is far from perfect. I like both operating systems but let’s be honest neither are perfect. While Windows displays a blue screen Lion simply stops responding until you reach the conclusion that a reboot is required. I think I prefer the blue screen warning to the couple minutes of WTF before rebooting.
I recently switched from Win 7 to Lion, and trust me Lion is far from perfect. I like both operating systems but let’s be honest neither are perfect. While Windows displays a blue screen Lion simply stops responding until you reach the conclusion that a reboot is required. I think I prefer the blue screen warning to the couple minutes of WTF before rebooting.
or you could get a console and stop crying.
oh ho! i see! it’s funnay because it’s windows not working! haha! good one!
+1 to that!
I thought it’s blog about Mac things. oops, looks like i was wrong. Now i need find new cool true mac blog, without Balmer-monkeys and his stupid things. I hate everything stupid, especially Microsoft.
At the build conference. I cannot link anything cause CoM blocks comments with links, but if you google you can find another clearly not-photoshopped pic of the new BSoD.
Just because they showed the new bsod at the conference doesn’t mean it’s gonna be some common occurrence. I honestly think the only people who really get bsod often are doing something stupid, or buying cheap hardware.
Buuut, why is this on a mac blog?
haha tipical
I’ve never had a BSoD either. True story, fanboy.