Earlier this year, it appeared that Microsoft would permanently change the color of the familiar, albeit terrifying, "blue screen of death" (BSOD) on Windows machines from blue to black.
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See also: Windows 11 gets Microsoft Teams 'mute button' on the taskbar
The Blue Screen of Death is something that serves as a very clear message that something has gone wrong with your Windows computer. Over the years, Microsoft has updated the screen with more details as to what exactly went wrong, but the screen has almost always been blue.
Microsoft never explained why it changed the error screen to black, but, as Ars Technica spotted, the company is bringing back the old color (blue) in a preview of Windows 11 in the Beta and Release Preview channels that was released on Friday.
The list of improvements in Windows 11 Preview Build 22000.346 is a bullet point stating that: “We changed the screen color to blue when a device stops working or a stop error occurs like in previous versions of Windows.”
Windows 11 is gradually addressing bugs in its core user interface and system functions, including the taskbar, Start menu, File Explorer, Search, and more – many of which its engineers had addressed before the official October 5th release date and continue to fix in the latest preview builds of Windows, as they add new Teams chat features to the desktop OS.
See also: Microsoft: Why it is working on the “Windows 11 SE” version
The latest preview includes improvements to the Start menu, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Search, issues affecting hibernation, some long-standing networked printer issues, Xbox One and Xbox Series peripheral audio issues, and File Explorer bugs.
It's still early days for Windows 11. Microsoft is ramping up the availability of Windows 11 to more devices, but the rollout is expected to take some time due to Microsoft's minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11.
ZDNet's Ed Bott estimates that nearly two-thirds of the 1.3 billion PCs running Windows 10 will not be eligible for the Windows 11 upgrade due to these requirements. That's roughly in line with the results of a survey of 30 million corporate PCs by IT asset management firm Lansweeper, which estimated that 55% of those PCs would not meet Microsoft.
Microsoft is expected to release Windows 10 version 21H2 soon, but it hasn't said whether, after that release, it will do two Windows 10 feature releases a year like it has done in the past – only that Windows 10 would be supported until October 14, 2025.
In a post last week, however, Microsoft encouraged users on Windows 10 version 2004, which expires on December 14, to upgrade to Windows 11.
Information source: zdnet.com
