Software · guide

Blue screen error, and why it is not blue any more

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 13 min read

Blue screen error is a name Microsoft itself has stopped relying on. On current Windows 11 the screen is black, the company documents the change and the version it arrived in, and the same page that answers this question lists three different names and two different colours for the same event.

Microsoft says the colour “can vary”; it does not say which version gives which. A manufacturer does, in one sentence: “On Windows 11 version 24H2 and later, it appears as a black screen; on Windows 11 23H2 and earlier, and on Windows 10, it appears as a blue screen.” That is Dell, and it turns a vague reassurance into something you can check against your own machine — which matters, because somebody searching for a black crash screen who finds only pages about blue ones will reasonably conclude they have a different problem. Dell also adds a cause that has nothing to do with software: “Overheating can cause a stop code error even on a computer with no other hardware faults.”

With the name settled, the useful question is what to do — and on that Microsoft publishes a figure, which is rarer than a list of causes.

Everything else on the screen is there to narrow it down, and it is worth knowing what each part is before the machine restarts itself.

The third card deserves a moment. The percentage counter means the machine is saving the evidence, and interrupting it — by cutting the power because the screen looks stuck — is how a crash becomes unexplainable. On Windows 11 24H2 that wait is much shorter than it used to be: Microsoft says 24H2 “reduced the time users spend on the screen from 40 seconds to just 2 seconds for most consumer devices” — consumer devices, not every machine: the same post says enterprises keep collecting kernel dumps by default and must opt in to the shorter wait.

And if the seventy per cent figure points at drivers, Windows already ships the tool for testing them.

So the order that follows from the documentation. Write down the stop code and, if one appears, the module name — those two strings are the whole diagnosis in compressed form. Let the percentage finish so the dump gets written. Then look at drivers first, because that is where Microsoft puts seven of every ten of these errors, and the machine keeps a record of what happened that is linked from the guide on random freezes.

A note on what this page deliberately does not do. It does not list stop codes with causes beside them. Microsoft publishes a reference of them, it runs to hundreds, and reproducing a fraction of it here would be worse than pointing at the whole thing.

A note on other guides. Google did not return readable search results while this page was written, so this page makes no claim about what is on Google’s first page for this question.

What this page will not do is tell you which driver is at fault. The module name on the screen and the dump file are the evidence; reading them is a separate job with its own tools.

It will not tell you to reinstall Windows. If the cause is a driver, the reinstall removes the symptom and leaves the driver waiting to be installed again.

And it will not recommend a driver-updater product. The verifier is already on the machine, and the tools that promise to fix drivers automatically are the least tested category in this entire section.

Not covered here. It will not list stop codes with causes beside them. Microsoft publishes a reference running to hundreds; quoting a handful would be worse than pointing at all of it.

It will not name your faulty driver. The module name and the dump file are the evidence, and reading them is a separate job.

It will not tell you to reinstall Windows. Where a driver is the cause, that removes the symptom and keeps the cause.

And it carries no affiliate links, including for driver-updater products, the products a guide on this subject usually exists to sell. What holds instead is simple: the colour change and the seventy per cent are quoted from Microsoft’s own support pages and announcements, named where they are used.