There's all kinds of new hotness in Snow Leopard and Windows 7, but what's old and busted is when stuff crashes, even on the newest OSes. This is how that happens, and why it's thankfully happening less and less.

There are about a bajllion ways for a computer to crash, from hardware to software, so we're going to start with the little crashes and work our way towards kernel panics and BSODs.

Application Crashes

Broadly speaking, the two most common causes of crashes, according to Microsoft's Chris Flores, a director on the Windows team, are programs not following the rules, and programmers not anticipating a certain condition (so the program flips out). The most obvious example of the former is a memory error. Basically, an operating system gives a program a certain amount of memory to use, and it's up to the program to stay inside the boundaries. If a program makes a grab for memory that doesn't belong to it, it's corrupting another program's—or even the OS's—memory. So the OS makes the program crash, to protect everything else.

In the other case, unexpected conditions can make a program crash if it wasn't designed with good exception handling. Flores' "oversimplified" example is this: Suppose you have a data field, like for a credit card number. A good programmer would make sure you type just numbers, or provide a way for the program to deal with you typing symbols or letters. But if the program expects one type of data and gets another, and it's not designed to handle something it doesn't expect, it can crash.

A completely frozen application is one that has crashed, even though it stays on your screen, staring at you. It's just up to you to reach for the Force Quit and tell the computer to put it out of its misery. Sometimes, obviously, the computer kills it for you.

Crashes, as you probably experience almost daily, are limited to programs. Firefox probably crashes on you all the time. Or iTunes (oh God, iTunes). But with today's operating systems, if you hit an omega-level, take-down-your-whole-system crashes, something's likely gone funky down at the kernel level.

System Crashes

The kernel is the gooey core of the operating system. If you think of an operating system as a Tootsie pop with layers of sugary shell, it's down at the lowest level managing the basic things that the OS needs to work, and takes more than a few licks to get to.

More than likely, your computer completely crashes out way less than it used to—or at least, way less than Windows 95. There's a few reasons for that. A major reason, says Maximum PC Editor Maximus Will Smith, is that Apple and Microsoft have spent a lot of time moving stuff that used to run at really low level, deep in the guts of the OS, up a few layers into the user space, so an application error that would've crashed a whole system by borking something at the kernel level just results in an annoying program-level hang up. More simply put, OSes have been getting better at isolating and containing problems, so a bad app commits suicide, rather than suicide bombing your whole computer.

This is part of the reason drivers—the software that lets a piece of hardware, like a video card talk to your OS and other programs—are a bigger source of full-on crashes than standard apps nowadays when it comes to modern operating systems. By their nature, drivers have pretty deep access, and the kernel sits smack in the middle of that, says Flores. So if something goes wrong with a driver, it can result in some bigtime ka-blooey. Theoretically, signed (i.e., vetted) drivers help avoid some of the problems, but take graphics drivers, which were a huge problem with Vista crashes at launch: Flores says that "some of the most complex programming in the world is done by graphics device driver software writers," and when Microsoft changed to a new driver model with Vista, it was a whole new set of rules to play by. (Obviously, stuff got screwed up.)

Another reason things crash less now is that Apple and Microsoft have metric tons of data about what causes crashes with more advanced telemetry—information the OS sends home, like system configurations, what a program was doing, the state of memory, and other in-depth details about a crash—than ever. With that information, they can do more to prevent crashes, obviously, so don't be (too) afraid to click "send" on that error message.

In Windows 7, for instance, there's a new fault tolerance heap—basically, a heap's a special area of memory that's fairly low-level—which could get corrupted easily in past versions of Windows. In Windows 7, it can tell when a crash in the heap is about to happen and take steps to isolate an application from everything else.

Future Crashes

Of course, there are other reasons stuff can crash: Actual hardware problems, like a memory failure, or motherboard component failures. Hard drive issues. Hell, Will Smith tells us that a new problem with high-performance super-computing clusters are crashes caused by cosmic rays. A few alpha particles fly through a machine and boom, crash. They weren't a problem 30 years ago.

Granted, you don't have to worry about that too much. What you might worry about in the future, says Smith, with the explosion of processor cores and multi-threaded programs trying to take advantage of them, are the classic problems of parallel processing, like race conditions, where two processes are trying to do something with the same piece of data, and the order of events gets screwed up, ending in a crash. Obviously, developers would very much prefer if the next 5 years of computing didn't result the Windows 95 days, and programming techniques are always growing more sophisticated, so there's probably not a huge danger there. But as long as humans, who make mistakes, write programs, there will be crashes, so they're not going away, either.

Thanks to Maximum PC's Will Smith! Blue Screen of Death photo by Sean Galbraith originally posted on Gizmodo here.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about crashes, blueberry pie or popcorn kernels to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

To automatically read the most recent Windows 7 posts, hit this tag (and bookmark it).

Windows 7 Beta Installation Advice
(Note: The beta is available until February 10th, though downloads may be limited, so hurry!)
• How to Download and Install Windows 7 Beta
• How To Install Win 7 on Macs with Boot Camp
• Understanding the Windows 7 Beta Agreement Fine Print

Windows 7 Feature Analysis:
• Why Microsoft Should Give Windows 7 Away
• Why the Windows 7 Taskbar Beats the Mac OS X Dock
• Why It's Smart To Go 64-Bit With Windows 7
• Windows 7 Runs Better Than Vista On Netbooks
• Why Windows 7 Will Beat Vista Overall

Windows 7 Beta Tips
• The Calculator Now Calculates Your Mortgage Payments and More
• Miss Vista's Quick Launch? Here's How You Get It Back
• Registry Tweak Fixes Window Gadgets and UAC Incompatibility
• Adding Extra Monitors Is So Easy a Caveman Could Do It
• 'Play To' Media Control Might Take Over Your Whole House
• Xbox 360 Streaming Is Buggy For Now, but it Still Works...Kinda
• Windows Explorer Preview Pane Works Much Better Than Vista's
• The Windows Key Is Actually Useful Now!
• Maximize and Dock Your Windows by Dragging to the Screen Edge
• Where the Hell is Add/Remove Programs?
• ISO Disc Image Burning Is Built Right In
• Device Stage Gadget Interface Is Gorgeous (When Supported!)
• Libraries Replace the Antiquated Virtual Folders Feature
• Now You Can Choose Which Folders to Back Up and Create System Images
• Fix That MSI Installer Bug And Get Apps Running Again
• Windows Home Server Almost 100% Compatible Already
• Gadgets Integrated to Desktop (But Still Buggy in Beta)
• New WordPad Opens Word 2007 XML Docs
• Careful: Windows 7 Beta Sleep/Hibernate Is Still Buggy
• Windows 7 Taskbar UI Tips
• Inside the Amazing Problem Steps Recorder

Windows 7 General Observations
• Huge Security Flaw in Windows 7 User Account Control
• Windows 7 Is OK, But Can It Run Crysis?
• Windows XP, Vista and 7 Tested For Multicore Performance, XP Still Wins For Now
• Windows 7 Performance Meter Goes Up To 7.9, Still Not Fantastic For Gaming Measurements

Funny—and Not So Funny—Windows 7 Experiences
• The First Windows 7 Blue Screen of Death
• 131 BSODs We'd Rather See
• 25 Features You Definitely Won't See in Windows 7

It's good to see that Microsoft hasn't bothered to change the old Windows blue screen; and by good, we mean bad. Isn't it about time to fail a little bit more gracefully? Or at the very least, in a way that actually makes sense to end-users? The error throws up the driver that caused it (way at the bottom of the error) before automatically rebooting, but actually identifying it via which type of component it is—sound, video, USB, hard drive—would be useful for people who just want to know what they did to cause it.

It's a beta, Microsoft, but it's doubtful you have enough time to revamp this BSOD for launch. Maybe by Windows 8?

Matt says that doing a clean install (completely uninstalling your previous version of iTunes before loading up iTunes 8) has resulted in no BSOD issues for him on Vista 64-bit, but that hasn't been tested by the public at large yet. Apple's asking for dump files to figure out where the problem's coming from, but until they post an update, I predict rioting! Mayhem! Pillaging of Apple stores all around the country! Or just a bunch of Windows-based iTunes users grumbling into the night about how all the fancy schmancy graphics in the world can't make up for crappy software testing. [Apple Forums]

UPDATE: And it's been confirmed on the NBC broadcast by commenter cirby on his DVR.

Click for high-res:

Ouch! More super-zoomed images for error message decoding here:
[Powerapple Forum (Chinese, original pic), and Rivercool (alternate angle pics) via Dvorak - props to Dvorak commenter Improbus for "Olympic Fail"]

Read more pan-Gawker coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games.

But the best part is that he usually hated this Microsoft-caught-without-pants humor. He tells his story after the jump.

Mark, There are images of weird BSOD all over the web and you've even done a couple of stories on them, but to tell you the truth I've never really found them all that funny. So what if an ATM has a BSOD, they're thousands of them running 24-7, one of them is bound to crash. It could also be that I'm a life long PC user. However, after a week of toting my two little girls all over Disney World and into and out of every kind of Disney store imaginable, I found the scene of a Potato Head with a Blue Screen on Death funny enough that I actually laughed a little and had to take a picture. Sorry the photo is a little blurry. I had to turn the flash off so the screen would show up. Danny

Slot Machine Suffers Blue Screen of Death [The Inquirer]