[for-q-clinton]

That's a turn off. A hidden BSOD is a restart, just as if you'd hit a hard reset button.

It's clear you don't know what you're talking about. A BSOD is not created when you reset your machine.

[zeugma]

That's a turn off. A hidden BSOD is a restart, just as if you'd hit a hard reset button.

It's clear you don't know what you're talking about. A BSOD is not created when you reset your machine.

I believe he was making an analogy. A "hidden BSOD" is like you hit a hard reset button. There is a setting under XP that can be set so that instead of displaying a BSOD, when a catastrophic fault occurs, the computer just reboots. It's not like many people actually write down the codes the BSOD displays. 

I can see this being of value to many people, who aren't particularly interested in the output of the dump  a BSOD generates. For myself, when I have a kernel panic, I'd rather know about it. Since I haven't had one in ages, (since I don't do MS-Windows) I guess it's a fairly moot point.

[antiRepublicrat]

It's clear you don't know what you're talking about. A BSOD is not created when you reset your machine.

No, that makes it clear you don't know what you're talking about. It's the other way around. Spontaneous restarts (not shutdowns caused by heat) are BSODs that have been trapped by the system, which restarts itself instead of displaying a BSOD.

System Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery settings, System failure, uncheck "Automatically restart" to bring back the BSOD. If your setting in this is to do a complete memory dump, you may have noticed that the system was unresponsive before the restart.