Blue Screen of Death/Talk

The consumer versions of Windows have their own blue screen, but I've never seen the true Blue Screen of Death -- at least to my usage of the term. You get messages like 'The system is waiting for a program to complete, esc to continue or ctrl-alt-delete to reboot'. Generally the three fingered salute is the only effective way out, but one can gamely try the alternatives. Windows 3.1, if I recall correctly, would even do this for things like a floppy disk being ejected while a file was being accessed from the floppy. --Belltower

Windows 98SE BSoD's on some occasions when reading off of removable media, ie cdrom and floppy, and the media is removed in the process, not very ammusing. --Creaktop

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As a reluctant Windows user (used to be a Mac user), I have seen what I always thought was called the blue screen of death far too many times--it's a common feature of all Windows systems, I thought. I've changed the article to reflect this. What I didn't know is that there are some people who restrict the usage only to the screen that occurs on Windows NT. Here's an example where programmers' usage and common usage might diverge, and where the article might usefully contain information about that divergence. Of course, I could just be confused. --LMS

It is a silly distinction. Even the folks at Microsoft on the Windows 95 team called their version "blue screen of death", though they knew it was somewhat different from the NT version. The public certainly calls all of the Windows blue-screens that. --LDC (Who actually understands the number on the real NT BSoD)

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Content from Blue screen of death. I don't think it adds anything new, but feel free to integrate it with the main article:

The 'Blue Screen of Death' (BSOD) is a text-only screen with white text displayed on a blue background: it is the response of the Microsoft Windows operating system to a major internal operating system inconsistency, the equivalent of a 'kernel panic' in UNIX-compatible systems.

The BSOD has been used as a symbol of the perceived lower reliability of the Windows operating environment compared to UNIX-compatible systems such as Linux.