Microsoft sees red over blue screen of death

For years, Windows users have had the frustration of seeing their screens go blue and an error message appear saying that the machine has crashed.

Now the next generation of Vole's Windows, dubbed Longhorn, has an addition to the ‘Blue Screen of Death'.

On his bog here, Microsoft techie Michael Kaplan, who has been playing with a Longhorn beta, describes how the Red Screen of Death appears.

He thinks that it is supposed to appear if something really bad happens. However Red Screen of Death seems to have appeared by making a "small set-up change" and altering the registry.

He got a Red Screen when he rebooted Longhorn's virtual image. "I am not sure I would class the change as an improvement. I mean, the old message ("Windows cannot start because the following file is missing or corrupt: WINDOWSSystem32") is one I understand since I know what the destructive operation was. But if I did not have that knowledge then I would not know much about what was going on," Kaplan said.

So it appears that great joys await users of Longhorn. µ