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Comment by bjpbakker | Hacker News Reader

The /only/ way (still) for MS to get rid of the blue-screen-of-death seems to change the color :)

For Insider builds it is a Green Screen of Death, to make it obvious it was an Insider build and not a production build.

Certain kinds of boot errors get a Red Screen of Death.

Since Windows 8, I think the Blue Screen of Death is starting to get just as much momentum behind it being called the Frowny Face of Death. I overhead one person even say, "My machine frowny faces a lot these days."

Here's something funny.

It was back in 1995. I'd just loaded Windows NT 3.51 on my computer. Not long after, I got my first BSoD. What to do?

So of course I gathered as much info as I could, and I promptly reported it to Microsoft. (That just shows you now naive I was at the time). I think someone even contacted me; not that they ever seriously followed up.

True story.

But there's a larger point, which is that if, back in 1995, Microsoft actually made a serious effort to debug and fix these problems, we'd all be better off today.

Sorta like the quote, from memory: "If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed ... wait, he does!".

They could change it to grey to match a certain other OS's screen of death.

My vote is then for beige or black, so the BSD acronim still stands :)

Rather BSOD. BSD stands for a certain unix-like distribution, and has little to do with Windows ;)

Yes, I stand corrected. BSoD it is.

Call them "bugchecks" instead - that's the actual Windows kernel API that produces these blue/red/green/whatever-color screens:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff...

Windows 7 and 8.1 users were provided the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 10. Per the article, it does not have the bug. Many people who are running the old versions of Windows are doing so by choice.

Win 7 and 8 are not a foolish choice, they are still in support.

I did not mean to imply it was a foolish choice. Rather, I meant that it is often a deliberate choice that includes technical tradeoffs and this is one of them. The fact that 7 and 8 are still supported makes Windows more stable than Android or iOS. My intuition is that Windows 10 collects less telemetry than either of those and that what telemetry it collects that cannot be turned off is shared with fewer parties than a mobile device.

I'm intentionally still on 8.1 due to the telemetry/tracking/ads/etc in 10. Slowing converting our stack at work off all MS so that my next OS doesn't have to be Windows.

As I said for many people it is a deliberate decision not to use Windows 10. Like any technical decision, it involves tradeoffs. The same was true when Windows 8 came out. And the popular media was filled with stories about how bad it was and how great Windows 7 was.

That's what I was prepared for when I installed Windows 8 and when I started using it I thought there was no way I would be productive. Then after about the first two hours or so, I decided to try the tutorials and within three hours of finishing the install over Windows 7, I was fully productive, because all the fuss about no start menu was about not knowing how to press the start key on the keyboard.

With Windows 10, I use |Settings| to set what I want and don't have much trouble and when I do, I just turn it off. Compared to my smartphone, it's a relatively high level of privacy. Though none of it is really private since someone resolves my DNS requests and my ISP routes packets before they get out of the building...not dissimilar to my wireless provider's access. And when I take my smartphone out and about, all kinds of beacons can ping it and ID it and most phones default to automatically connecting to whatever network there is.

I'm intentionally still on 8.1 due to the telemetry/tracking/ads/etc in 10.

Does that work?

Didn't Microsoft back-port some telemetry stuff into Win8 and push it during their updates? Ads no, but telemetry yes?

I'm just asking, I don't follow this too closely since I've been Windows-free at home (except for Freecell in a VM) for well over a decade.

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