A Microsoft blogger has published screenshots of what he claims is an upgrade to the infamous 'blue screen of death' which can appear when Windows crashes.

Michael Kaplin, technical lead for Globalization Infrastructure, Fonts and Tools at Microsoft, reports in his blog that, as well as the blue screen, a red screen will be included that indicates a more serious problem.

"I am not sure I would class the change as an improvement. The old message ['Windows cannot start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\System32'] is one I understand since I know what the destructive operation was," he wrote.

"But if I did not have that knowledge then I would not know much about what was going on."

Kaplin was only able to access the screen after deliberately tweaking the registry settings on his PC. The discovery came as part of an attempt to set up a virtual PC to test the first beta of Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn operating system.