At work, I am (reluctantly) using a windows machine for most tasks. It's a 64-bit windows 7 installation. And to be honest, using the system is not half bad. It is probably the best user experience I ever had with any OS from Redmond (I got cygwin and a tiny virtual machine, that runs a linux system on top of windows, whenever I feel limited by the environment). In particular, the system is pretty damn stable. Sure, the odd third party program would crash every once in a while. But that's hardly Microsoft's fault. …I had almost forgotten what a bluescreen looked like.

Until now. :)

My system has a dual-monitor setup. And I usually have a field-simulator, or EDA software running on one and communication software (email etc.) on the other monitor. When one day, the following transpired: Suddenly, the mouse pointer refuses to react to movements of the pointer device, that usually controls it. Then the left monitor turns black. Then, a second or two later, the right monitor turns black. Then, after a few seconds, both monitors display the same bluescreen, with the OS dumping its memory to disk. After that, the system dies and boots again.

Unfortunately, the camera on my phone didn't start up quickly enough for me to take a screenshot. Bummer, right? But don't dispair, crashes always come in pairs, as the ancient Aztec saying tells us… Two days later, the system crashed again and this time I recognised the early symptoms and got my camera running quickly enough:

Window 7 BlueScreen of Death

When the machine came back up, it greeted me with the following dialog box:

Window 7 Crash Dialog

Cute, right? “Unerwartetes Herunterfahren” or “Unexpected Shutdown” (Reason: BlueScreen). No Shit, Sherlock! That was indeed unexpected as fuck, thankyouverymuch. The simulation software that you forced to the ground alongside yourself also asked me to convey its sincerest gratitude, since the problem it was solving for me was boring anyway.

Let's hope that this was the entirety of my share of BlueScreen crashes for this decade.

Posted Mon 17 Mar 2014 14:26:21 CET Tags: