The blue screen of death, AKA BSOD, is the page that appears whenever Micro$oft Windows crashes. Fortunately, with Windows XP this has become a far less common event, although still by no means unknown. It’s basically a bright blue screen with a basic font error message, telling you that your machine has died and giving you a reference number that means nothing to you at all and usually isn’t very helpful.
It’s nice to see then that the XBox 360 has a had a bit more thought put into it’s version of the BSOD, with a multi-lingual generic error message and a large pinstripe effect in the background. Have a look for yourself.
It rather worrying really that only a couple of days after the machine’s US release that there are already quite a few errors being reported. The usual ‘it’s not as next-generation as I expected’ complaints are standard, but it seems unusual for consoles to have problems loading software at the time of release. It may simply be that this is a major launch, with a huge amount of hype, all happening in an age of massive instant internet feedback. Even if 0.001% of machines have problems it can still seem like a massive issue if those people go online to a few notable forums.
Still, it’s nice that the BSOD has had some design work put into it! 😀
Fancy getting an Xbox? UK link
Xbox 360 BSOD info source here.