Yesterday, BlogoFlux reported on an issue affecting a limited amount of users and dubbed the “Black Screen Of Death”.
Originally, at least according to Prevx, the “Black Screen Of Death” could affect “millions”. Prevx, a little known software company from the UK, claimed that Microsoft’s recent patches (KB915597 and KB976098) were at fault in triggering a dumb session of Windows after login. The symptoms resulted in post logon having no desktop, task bar, system tray or side bar. Instead you are left with a totally black screen and a single My Computer Explorer window.
Initially BlogoFlux commenters were doubtful, and rightly so. “Who the hell are Prevx?” asked one and “the story just seems odd to me” another. It appears that both Prevx and ComputerWorld, who published the story as “Latest Microsoft patches cause black screen of death”, jumped in way too early. According to Microsoft, the reports of the issues weren’t even brought to them directly and through the usual channels. “Because these reports were not brought to us directly, it’s impossible to know conclusively what might be causing a “black screen” in those limited instances where customers have seen it” said Christopher from the The Microsoft Security Response Center.
Microsoft also confirmed they had not seen broad incident reports on the issue, stating “we’ve also checked with our worldwide Customer Service and Support organization, and they’ve told us they’re not seeing “black screen” behavior as a broad customer issue.”
Meanwhile, Prevx have now issued an apology regarding their “findings”. Prevx now blame malware for making changes to the registry which causes this behaviour. In a statement on Prevx’s company blog, Jacques Erasmus, director of research at Prevx stated “we apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused. This has been a challenging issue to identify.”
Be it screensavers, desktop wallpapers or font type and sizes, visual customization at the OS level is usually important to all kinds of users. Recognizing this, Microsoft has made it easier than ever to apply and adjust individual themes with Windows 7. We looked at this last week showing you how to find hidden themes buried in your hard drive as well as sponsored ones available through Microsoft’s online Personalization Gallery.
This time around, we are going to show you how to customize the Windows 7 login screen. There are various methods to accomplish this, with and without third-party software. I understand many people might not want to rely on a third-party application, while others would appreciate a quicker, safer route. First up is the more hands-on approach, and then the utility.
View: How to Change the Logon Screen Wallpaper on Windows 7
Microsoft have made changes to the browser ballot screen that will prompt users in Europe to help them make selections on which browser they would like to use. The modified browser ballot screen will open up to testers in Europe that will include the following changes:
- Make it so competing browsers can be downloaded from the ballot screen more quickly and easily
- Ensure equivalent placement on the Windows 7 taskbar for Internet Explorer and all other browser icons
- Add introductory information, improving the design of the ballot page about each browser to help users make more informed choices
- Alphabetize the list of browsers so that the five most popular are listed first (by vendor), followed by the next seven most popular (also alphabetically ordered), so that 12 choices are displayed in total
- Provide the browser ballot to users for five years
The purposed changes will surely please the European Commission (EC) regulators and many consumers in Europe. The browser ballot screen will allow users to not only install other browsers, 12 in total, including Internet Explorer, but be able to uninstall Internet Explorer all together.
The newly modified browser ballot screen makes choosing what browser consumers want to use easily, ranking the top five browsers in current use in alphabetical order, sorted by vendor, shown on the main view with Safari, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.
Microsoft plans to push the browser ballot screen through Windows Update to Windows 7 PCs, including machines that go on sale on October 22.
