Why blue screen?
 

I was wondering why microsoft chose a blue colour for their error/crash screen aka Blue screen of death

I am sure all windows users have at least got one once in their computing lifetime, but i am curious to why that colour?
I mean, you'd think it might be red or something since red is associated with warnings and anger :p
Although, i must admit, Red screen of death doesn't hvae the same zing or appeal of the former.

Any other apt colours you can think of? or the reason why it's blue in the first place?

White on (true) blue is very easy to read, maybe it was there assuming a million things could be going wrong, and the display could be messed up... so it would be best to make it clear and "crisp".

I'm just making that up, though.

hmm blue and white are associated with freezing, and thats what a BSOD is sort of :)

probaly just clarity as fractured said, its a colour scheme that works really well, makes you pay more attention than just black and white without being obnoxious

well you cant call something a blue screen of death if its not blue :p

I like that. :)

To this day, I get chills running up my spine when I see that color blue. I started getting random BSODs right after I flashed the BIOS on my brand new $300 Radeon 8500. I thought for sure I had fried it. Turned out to be a bad stick of RAM. :D

ya, it doesn't happen much with xp unless you have serious hardware problems. it's definately scary. On the other hand, i wander what it would be like if instead the screen was red. i bet many peopel would smash thier computer screen (red makes you angry)

Microsoft's corporate colors are white and blue. Hmm...

Doesn't answer your question, but it is believed that the first use of the term BSOD comes from this haiku, which was part of a haik error message contest:

Hell ---I get so many blue screens on this old Dell v350 that i consider it SOP...

got rid of a lot of them by down loading a bunch of patchs...

I got the Blue Screen a month ago, my computer had to get ghosted. I was in the middle of tpying in Word and the Blue Screen popped up and then Windows was GONE. So they ghosted the C: drive (all my data was on the D: partition luckily)

For those of you who want to, here's a site detailing how to change the color of your bluescreen to something else.

http://www.beemerworld.com/tips/bsodchange.htm

well red would be hard on your eyes if it was dark and the only light was the monitor..

speaking of blue...

i saw an XP pro box bsod for the first time tonight.

I was almost under the impression i'd never have to see it again :p

i wonder if theres anyone left at the company that made NT, we can call and ask :)

I heard something about blue having the lowest or highest hertz out of all the colours and that's also why the sky is blue, out of default. So that means it's the easiest colour to display. They say that nature is lazy and apparently so is microsoft. I'm sorry about being so vague but I really dont know what im talking about, mostly.