[redcap]

A frowny is a defacto (Western) Internet standard indicating sadness or disappointment. In Japan you could possibly write ;_;

You could also look upon it as a relation to Apple's "Sad Mac" that's been around for probably more than 20 years.

Personally I think having a bit of personality takes the edge away from the harshness of a BSOD.

[savoytruffle]

Of course in the days of the Sad Mac, that was only upon a failed boot. When it crashed it showed a cartoony round bomb with a lit fuse on the end. Made people mad!

[stevenbedrick]

I've always liked Neal Stephenson's description of the little bomb icon:

"When a Macintosh got into trouble it presented you with a cartoon of a bomb, which was funny the first time you saw it."[1]

1: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

[duskwuff]

The Sad Mac is no longer used, actually -- I believe it was removed from the ROM in NewWorld PPC machines (iMac G3 and newer). Current machines just display a circle/slash symbol on POST failure.

[beedogs]

I liked it when they had the STOP code and the memory dump. There was something... useful? about it.

This removes that information and replaces it with a 72 point emoticon.

[darklajid]

How many people in your inner circle were able to make _any_ use of that information?

I'm not sure what to think about the emoticon (don't like those too much), but I don't think something valuable to the general public was lost here..

[dfxm12]

I get what you are saying, but now no one has any information about what the problem might be and how to fix it, as opposed to people savvy enough to Google the STOP code (and I think you are underestimating the current population and certainly ignoring people's ability to learn to Google error messages).

Sure, there was something psychologically jarring about the old BSOD, but without giving us any clue as to what went wrong with the computer, how is anyone supposed to be able to fix it? Is it impossible to display a STOP code in a friendly manner?

[runjake]

Yes, they do. People knowledgeable in Windows analyze the dump files a BSOD creates. These file have all the information needed for debugging. In addition, it's dumped in the event logs.

People on HN seem pretty quick to jump on this pre-beta release, and Windows in general, without proper situational awareness.

[sid0]

- You can still google the code Windows provides.

- If you're really savvy you know how to use WinDBG and load up a memory dump.

[jamesgeck0]

The STOP code is still there. It's small in that screenshot, but the bottom line reads "You can search for the error online: HAL INITIALIZATION FAILED".

[itsnotvalid]

Seems people are rushing to use Virtual Machine software to test drive. However most of them don't have the correct hal.dll support...

[joezydeco]

Are you supposed to write that down so you can search for it when the machine is done rebooting?

[notatoad]

yes. or i assume that 8 will have the same feature 7 does, in that on next boot it will give you a "windows has recovered from a serious error, would you like to go online to search for a solution" dialog.

[robflynn]

I've never actually received a response of any kind from that dialog. Weird.

[wmf]

When I get such an error I photograph it with my phone.

[maratd]

I'm sure all the relevant data is recorded in the event log, which is how it should be done. In fact, I do believe that's what the error message says in smaller font.

[barrkel]

Where is it recorded when the OS kernel loses access to persistent storage?

[maratd]

> Where is it recorded when the OS kernel loses access to persistent storage?

When your drive/chipset dies and you reboot, you'll get an error saying that no bootable drive is found. It'll be pretty obvious what happened at that point.

[jevinskie]

The disk subsystem can fail in software, just just hardware.

[vogonj]

KeBugCheckEx(), the method that displays a blue screen, dumps memory to the paging file (which is contiguous and fixed, so it doesn't need the FS driver). When a dump is about to be made, it hashes all of the pieces of the pager and the disk driver necessary to do the dump, and ensures that they aren't corrupted, then dumps. On reboot, the boot manager notices that the system died messily, and copies the paging file to a crash dump.

Now you know more than you ever wanted to about blue screens. :)

[runjake]

This is because the vast majority of Windows users have no clue about any of the information presented.

And the people who CAN use that information analyze the .dmp files on the filesystem. The .dmp files have the same info plus more.

[sid0]

I'm pretty sure they're still going to have the memory dump.