the blue flash of colonel panic
Sunday, January 13th, 2013 | tags: blue screen, computers, error, in my day, Microsoft, software, user experience, Windows |The Blue flash of colonel panic is not a military award, one of the X-men, X-women, a Transformer, or other superhero.
Windows 7 scary classic!
The file dump from Windows 7 “Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD)” happens so quickly that we rush to capture an digital image for posterity because maybe there will be a generation of computer users that have never see a blue screen. I hope so.
You can see the blue screen paparazzi in the reflection on an old Lenovo laptop. The windows 7 message is already teasing the user with more text than they can possibly read in the time it’s displayed! Squinting at the photograph I saw the phrase “BIOS updates” – a phrase that produces a mild form of the gagging reflex.
Windows 8 is succinct, readable, understandable and less SCARY!
The message has changed for Windows 8, it looks like a more graceful failure message because it has larger, more readable, and understandable text. It looks like they’ve actually written it for the normal people that will see it rather than for the developers. They no longer mention “Caching and shadowing”, “removing or disabling components” or the gaggable “Bios updates”. I wonder whether it’s still a ‘Blue Flash’. Excellent user experience enhancements.