Nobody likes to see a BSOD or Blue Screen of Death on Windows. So how about a red one?

Nobody likes to see a BSOD or Blue Screen of Death on Windows. The always entertaining and educational Mark Russinovich of Microsoft has found a kernel hack that can alleviate the problem, but only in the literal sense.

Yes, you can change the background color of the Windows crash screen to something other than blue. Consider this GSOD:

Russinovich unveiled the trick at the end of a Tech Ed presentation on Windows troubleshooting techniques. It's just something he saw a colleague do and it fit in with the work in the presentation on live hacking of kernel memory.

This isn't a setting that you can make persistent. You have to use kernel hacking tools to change a single byte in memory, the byte used by the Windows crash-handling code to fill in the background of the screen, and it will affect the next crash. After that crash, or a reboot, the value will revert to its default setting of 4 (blue).

But it is possible to have an RSOD.