Color Of Death

In many computer operating systems, a special type of error message will display onscreen when the system has experienced a fatal error. Computer users have dubbed these messages Screens of death , as they typically result in unsaved work being lost and often indicate serious problems with the system's hardware or software. Screens of death are usually the result of a kernel panic, although the terms are frequently used interchangeably. Most screens of death are displayed on an even background color with a message advising the user to restart the computer. Xscreensaver includes a BSOD module displaying simulated screens of death from many different operating systems.

Notable Screens of Death

• The Blue Screen of Death (also called BSOD, stop error, or bluescreen) is a common name for a screen displayed by the Microsoft Windows operating system when a system error occurs. At times, a Red Screen of Death (RSoD) may appear, as seen on the Windows 2008 server and a few beta builds of Windows, such as Memphis or Longhorn. It defines very critical hardware errors, or boot errors.
• The Black Screen of Death is usually one of four things: a failure mode of Microsoft Windows 3.x, the screen displayed by the OS/2 operating system in the event of either a system error from which it cannot recover or a "hard" error in a program running in "full screen" mode (the former being a serious system failure but the latter being a less serious application failure), the Nintendo Wii's non-recoverable brick screen, or the Linux Black Screen of Death.
• Several different operating systems and BIOSes may display a White Screen of Death for different types of failures.
• A Sad Mac is an iconic symbol used by older-generation Apple Macintosh computers, starting with the original 128K Macintosh, to indicate a severe hardware or software problem that prevented startup from occurring successfully.
• The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed when a "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) program had an application crash.
• Guru Meditation is the name of the error that occurred on early versions of the Amiga home computers when they crashed.