Originally Posted By: drakino
Windows shouldn't blue screen because of a bad call in a printer driver. Thankfully Microsoft felt the same way, and moved printer drivers out of ring 0 in 2000. Slowly, they are moving more and more out of ring 0. I've seen a number of times my machine would have BSODed in XP, but not in 7 due to video drivers moving what they can down into user space.

Yeah. Back in the old NT 3 days, most of the subsystems were actually outside of the kernel and in userspace. NT 4 moved a bunch of subsystems into the kernel to improve performance.

The Intel graphics driver for my laptop is really flakey and does crash quite often. I see the little balloon popup to say that something went wrong but it recovered. It must leave the hardware in an odd state however as its not quite right afterwards.