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Sunday, February 05, 2012

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?
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2 comments:

  1. Unknown1:22 AM, February 07, 2012

    Hi Carmi: Well, Vista operating program was very annoying. I hate to name drop here but "Toshiba" was not a good computer for me. As a journalist, I use a PC. That blue screen IS dreadful and my wallet begins to hurt when I see it! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Catherine9:43 PM, February 10, 2012

    We have always had Apples in our household, and I have no complaints at all. For instance, mine flew off the desk and across the room in an earthquake. Two days later when the power came back on, I picked it up, plugged it in and it worked fine (there was a dent in the edge of the desk where it hit on the way down, though). My daughter's laptop was run over by three cars in succession - the first car clipped her and broke the shoulder strap of the bag, then ran over the laptop as did the two that followed (all turning illegally). The screen was shattered, but all the data was able to be retrieved from the hard drive.

    ReplyDelete

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