Most Micro$oft Windows user experience the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) from time to time. For no apparent reason, the system decides to throw a bunch of garbled white on blue flavored rubbish at you.

In this article, we show you how to turn water into wine, or — well, change the color of the BSoD to something slightly less bold.

Step 1:

Locate the file system.ini. Usually, it is located in teh c:\windows\ folder. Open it with notepad, VIM or a similar text editor.

Step 2:

In the [386enh] section add the following two lines:

MessageBackColor=
MessageTextColor=

And assign a value to each of these, e.g.

MessageBackColor=1
MessageTextColor=2

chosen from the list below.

• 0 = black

• 1 = blue

• 2 = green

• 3 = cyan

• 4 = red

• 5 = magenta

• 6 = yellow/brown

• 7 = white

• 8 = gray

• 9 = bright blue

• A = bright green

• B = bright cyan

• C = bright red

• D = bright magenta

• E = bright yellow

• F = bright white

Step 3:

Close the file saving the changes

Step 4:

Reboot your computer.

Step 5:

Generate a BSoD on demand. Read the guide over at tech recipes for that. The result:

Impressive, aye?

[1] Petri

[2] Wikipedia page on BSoD

[3] Tech-Recipes