Blue Screen of Death

[ori]

Bored with your stable OS? Or wanna play a prank on someone? Tryout this
Microsoft Screensaver
Didn't know there were people with some humor at microsoft

 

[ara]

Hmmm...I remember the good old days with Windows 95. Seems fitting to bring back that screen I knew and loved (sarcasm implied)

 

[Genocidicbunny]

stop bumping old threads,
but yeah, this is quite a fun prank to play on someone, especially someone who's computer illiterate.

 

[TheLoneMan]

Vista has a red screen of death... weird.

 

[Tycoon101]

Kekeke, I have a feeling that I will be using this very soon

 

[Turner]

On our old Win95 systems at my last job, I would take a screenie of the login screen, hide the icons and toolbars, and wait for people to try and log in. I also used to tape the hook on the phone down, so that when they tried to answer the phone nothing happened. Ah, the good old days.

Yeah, I was fun to work with....

 

[Genocidicbunny]

I did the login screen thing ( or something similar) I took a screenshot of a guys desktop and then hid all his icons in his My Documents folder. Since in XP you can set that folder to show up only in the start menu it worked out perfectly. I hid the start bar and boom, when he came to his comp he found himself unable to click anything, even after 4 restarts. He even called the teacher who called the school IT guy who couldnt figure it out. Yeah, that was fun

 

[Sadan01]

Actually no one at Microsoft has a sense of humour. That screensaver came from the now defunct sysinternals.com (Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell). They have since joined Microsoft.

Sysinternals (Mark and Bryce) created a lot of very useful utilities for support/system admins/programmers etc and it is a shame that now Microsoft have gotten their hands on them as they will claim credit for largely the lack of work or screw ups in their O/S that these utilities go a long way to fix or extend.

 

[GenMarshall]

Hmmm...I remember the good old days with Windows 95. Seems fitting to bring back that screen I knew and loved (sarcasm implied)

Strange, I experianced no BSOD when I was using Windows 95 .

 

[BirraImperial]

Great find, Thanks

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Strange, I experianced no BSOD when I was using Windows 95 .

i shall now quote from IRC
<stickciv> windows likes stupid users

Dont take it personally though CG, but ive found that in general that statement is true.

 

[Souron]

My first thought after reading the discription was in relation to this: "system start screen is obtained from your system configuration". Is it prudent to have all your system specs showing on your screan saver?

 

[Chieftess]

On our old Win95 systems at my last job, I would take a screenie of the login screen, hide the icons and toolbars, and wait for people to try and log in.

My co-worker plays games at work (even some supervisors do.... strange place), so I took a screenshot, and deleted the games, then made the background the screenshot. It was a funny response when she tried to click on the icon. She's one of the help desk people, so I said, "Wanna make a Service Call? ".

Anyway, I've counted maybe a half-dozen BSOD in WinXP. Google Earth (one of the older versions) caused about half of them.

 

[Maniacal]

Yeah, XP rarely bluescreens, most of mine came from the Imperial Glory Demo, which bluescreend about 7 times on me before I deleted it.

Heh, my school library computers use 98, and I've gotten two or three bluescreens since september.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

My schools library computers are so old they cant even bluescreen. They run XP on a computer that can barely run 2000

 

[Pyrion]

In my experience, a blue screen in XP can be narrowed down to video card drivers, chipset drivers, bad registry settings, or a crashed hard drive.

I'm sure there's more things that could cause them, but I've never encountered any other than those.

 

[Turner]

Bad memory, too.

 

[ainwood]

You get less BSODs because the default in windows is to reboot instead of show the BSOD. Which is a pain, because then you don't get the "stop" message telling you what the problem was.

@Turner: Another good prank is to take the telephone apart and change:
[pre]
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
* 0 #
[/pre]
to

[pre]
7 8 9
4 5 6
1 2 3
* 0 #
[/pre]

Takes people a *long* time to work that one out

 

[Pyrion]

Bad memory, too.

True, but that tends to be noticed immediately because Windows will post STOP errors on boot if the memory is bad, even after the first install before it configures itself.

 

[Rheinmetall]

True, but that tends to be noticed immediately because Windows will post STOP errors on boot if the memory is bad, even after the first install before it configures itself.

These errors should pop up immediately during BIOS mem-check. If BIOS check doesn't find faulty memory and windows still experiences mem faults it's because of too high memory clocks, too fast latencies or insufficient memory voltage.