The not-quite blue screen of death

If you've used Windows for any period of time, you've likely become familiar - perhaps intimately so - with its blue screen of death. The BSOD is a sad fact of life for many, a reminder that the operating systems that define our personal and professional computing experiences are incredibly complex beasts with millions of lines of code that occasionally cough up a hairball. And when they do, you either get a BSOD or some similarly cryptic, technologically fatal, scary-to-the-folks-who-just-want-to-get-their-work-done message.

In this particular case, you're looking at my old work laptop. Either the hard drive was failing. Or the drive controller was failing. Or the chunk of the OS that communicates with the storage hardware was having a bad day. Or an internal cable was loose, fraying or fried. Or the Fijian god of motherboard bandwidth decided today was the day to revoke some juju.

Whatever it was, this hangar queen of a machine was soon returned from whence it came, replaced by another, significantly more reliable, Dell. I haven't see this message since. Whatever happened to that slacker dude who did their "Dude, you're getting a Dell" ads, anyway?

Your turn: Your worst computer ever was a...? What made it so lousy?