> In order for the document to help me, I clearly needed to find the four error parameters that used to be displayed with the blue screen on older versions of Windows. Windows 10 hides all the information by default, but I discovered that it’s possible to re-enable display of the extra error information by adding an entry to your registry.
It's still baffling how microsoft completely broke bluescreens by hiding any useful info.
Blue screens got a bad reputation because the people they were most often presented to had no idea how to consume the information. Presenting the right information to the right people is also important.
Everyone knows that a blue screen means that the OS crashed. Maybe they should be more helpful instead? Like, you know, actually show a human-readable description of the error, so the person who sees it knows where to start troubleshooting. Something like "kernel-mode driver for device X performed an invalid memory operation, please try updating it or report this to its developer" instead of "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA".
> "kernel-mode driver for device X performed an invalid memory operation, please try updating it or report this to its developer"
is a good example of a user-friendly error message either.
My experience in writing software and supporting it for end users (even highly educated users) has taught me that a large percentage of people will stop reading if they encounter any technical words or indirect statements. Honestly, I feel like the "Your computer ran into a problem and needs to restart. We'll restart it for you" message that Microsoft settled on is probably about the common denominator. It has no technical terms and it doesn't give the user an opportunity for decision paralysis.
People got more impatient over the years and now expect things just to work. I had a computer shop in the late 90s (my first and only business ever) and as lot of my clients where pretty much helpful with their observations when they brought their machines for me to fix.
It is not that people were smarter, of course, but they did expect to have to dirty their hands with their stuff from time to time. Nowadays, besides all of our protests at the contrary, stuff is way more reliable and ease to use, and people got used to complicated stuff just working.
Agree 100%. The idea of "what a computer is" and "who a computer is for" has changed quite a bit. I sometimes forget how far computing has come until I see an old news segment:
> People got more impatient over the years and now expect things just to work.
Except most of the time, things aren't aware of that.
Yes, today's operating systems are more reliable thanks to memory protection and better abstractions. But that's compensated by insatiable product managers that absolutely have to keep updating a feature-complete product at any cost with features and UI redesigns no one ever asked for.
But even if most people don't know how to consume it, it's a lot easier for a tech support rep to just ask for the numbers, rather than see if booting into safe mode or whatever will work well enough for them to walk the customer through manually adding registry entries (which just seems like a bad idea anyway), so they can get the extra debugging info.
Just leave it visible all the time, Microsoft! It won't hurt, and can certainly help!
I have religiously put debugging information into my error messages for the past decade. Often accompanied with a statement like "Please provide this information when reporting this error". I have supported thousands of users. I can count on one hand the number of times that a user has provided that debugging information to me when it was appropriate to do so. I am the only one who uses that debugging information, when I'm running my own tests.
In fact, sometimes I'll get support requests like "Hey I got this error 012345 what does that mean?" and the attached screenshot will show a message like: "Invalid Password, please type your password again (Error code: 012345)"
I absolutely understand the technical utility, but I really wouldn't be surprised if they have better overall support outcomes without it.
but the screenshot after enabling it just has 4 numbers in the top left corner in blue-on-blue text. i think most people would ignore those, since there's also a large plain english error message.
Not sure if it's "IT industry as a whole", or Microsoft, because if I'm trying to do tech support for someone, I definitely want that extra information.
Fascinating; so that makes me wonder if the bluescreen code flow also tries to look up the registry value, or if the boot process somehow reads that registry value so early in the boot that by the time a bluescreen happens, the value is already available to it ... in a specific memory location or something?
It's my idea of hell having an error handler that tries to do fancy stuff and then the error handler dies and swallows the original error condition
Also, if you happen to still have the link to that regkey description, I bet this audience would benefit from your research
It's still baffling how microsoft completely broke bluescreens by hiding any useful info.