Windows gets new “blue” screen of death and automated boot recovery

The blue screen of death has been such a core part of Windows that’s it’s become part of humanity’s collective consciousness. They’re not nearly as common anymore as they used to be back in the Windows 9x and early Windows XP days, but they do still occasionally when dealing with broken hardware, shoddy drivers, or other such faults.

Well, the blue screen of death is losing its eponymous blue colour, and will now clearly mention the stop code and where – in which driver – the kernel panic occurred.

The Windows 11 24H2 release included improvements to crash dump collection which reduced downtime during an unexpected restart to about two seconds for most users. We’re introducing a simplified user interface (UI) that pairs with the shortened experience. The updated UI improves readability and aligns better with Windows 11 design principles, while preserving the technical information on the screen for when it is needed.
↫ David Weston at the Windows Blogs

This is part of a new feature in Windows 11 called quick machine recovery, or QMR. If a Windows PC gets stuck in a boot loop, ending up in the Windows Recovery Environment, Microsoft can now deploy fixes and remediations through WinRE. This feature will become available later this year by default on Windows 11 Home, while on Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise, administrators can control how this feature works.

So far, it seems QMR is only intended to be used for widespread outages, but I wonder if it would be possible to eventually use QMR locally. It would be pretty neat if Microsoft released the server-side component of QMR so individuals can run and (ab)use it locally for their own machines.