@blakeyrat said:
The computer just reboots (admittedly with no warning) on XP and up. The BSOD screen is available by tweaking an advanced option, but since MS finally realized it's utterly useless to 99.99% of users, they just shove that information into the system's event viewer and reboot for you. (Since reboot is your only practical option at that point.)OS X, instead of just rebooting for you, gives you an information-less screen then asks you to manually reboot. Which is... goofy. But, again, since they control the drivers, it doesn't come up enough to really worry about anyway.
Given that, realistically, your only option is to reboot, I like the MS way better. At least it's slightly quicker at getting you back to a working desktop.
In fact, I'd prefer to get some kind of screen indicating what happened. Even if the only content amounts to "the operating system crashed, you need to reboot". It might save me the trouble of going through all sorts of hardware stability tests, especially temperature-related. Unfortunately Linux doesn't really show kernel panics when running a graphical environment, but fortunately those aren't all that common, so system freezes or crashes often enough are caused by hardware problems.
The last time my home computer started getting unexplained crashes, it turned out that one of my memory modules actually was bad. I got it exchanged under warranty, and the system has been stable again since then.