back to article BSODs at scale: We laugh at your puny five storeys, here's our SIX storey #fail

It's an easy drive-by troll, isn't it? Last week, we asked readers to top the five-storey Blue Screen of Death spotted in Thailand, and examples big and small flooded the inbox. Manchester Piccadilly Station is either vying for the crown with last week's entry, or perhaps it's a display from the same maker. Thanks to James for …

  1. Shadow Systems

    How about a BSOD on the IMAX screen?

    I got to watch a moment of horror/hilarity once when I went in to watch an IMAX movie & saw the BSOD instead of the advertising trailer. Luckily the theater operator had a back up system ready for JUST such emergencies & switched over to it in seconds, but I still laughed my arse off at "Holy Shit! That's HUGE!"

    The movie went off without a hitch, a good thing given it was a show about computers. =-)p

    1. Sampler

      We interrupt this movie to bring you this important BSOD

      I was just coming to comment something similar:

      https://www.dropbox.com/s/4kf1i9jjuh3kjsf/movie.jpg?dl=0

      this was only a few weeks back too, good to know they're using a supported OS (missed the BSOD, got the half a second flash before the auto-reboot realised and kicked in).

      Have a picture of a cash-machine booting NT somewhere too (but not on my camera roll, so that'll have to wait for another day) - the most distressing part wasn't it was a post Vista world, but that it'd moments before happily taken my debit card = \

      1. billse10

        Re: We interrupt this movie to bring you this important BSOD

        As a matter of interest, what was the age-rating on that movie? :)

      2. John Halewood

        Re: We interrupt this movie to bring you this important BSOD

        I had something very similar, except that it happened just after I put my card in. Stood there watching NT 3.51 boot up in the vain hope of getting my card back whilst the queue behind me got restless. Never did get the card back - it was quicker to get a new one issued.

        1. Elf
          Pint

          Re: We interrupt this movie to bring you this important BSOD

          WinNT 3.51, for real? I thought I'd seen them all. I thought I'd won with OS2 Warp a few years back.

          A beer for you, Sir.

          The amount of WinXP I see day to day is depressing. In a two kilometer walk ^*:

          * Cinema (and By Far the worst offender) ...

          - 10 Outside Displays (BSODs so often it's actually not funny anymore)

          - 10 POS (2 Ticket, 2 Restaurant, 2Bar, 4 Junk Food)

          * Pet Stuff Chain - 6 POS

          * Starbux (2 stores, in two km is considered low density here) - 2 POS Ea.

          * World Market - 4 POS

          * Gas (petrol for our English speaking friends) station ...

          - 2 POS

          - 1 ATM Stand-Alone Machine (yeah, like I'm ever going to use that).

          - 1 WiFi Network with WEP that has all of the above plus CCTV on it (that I can see from my apartment). ^**

          * Gas Station (next block) ...

          - 1 POS

          - 1 ATM Stand-Alone Machine

          ^* This is just what I can see, mind you, and doesn't consider what we all know is in The Back Room. I'll put a fiver down, for sport, that the Pet Store is Novell.

          ^** My corner store of sorts, people are a riot so yes I shop there, I just use cash.

          Now, the punchline to this, I live in Redmond, Wa, Microsoft Town. For a town largely directed by a company that has publicly EOLd a product and also publicly poo-poos product of same, there sure is a hell of a lot of it.

          1. swm
            Happy

            Re: We interrupt this movie to bring you this important BSOD

            I still run XP and am very happy with it. I don't run antivirus (it never stopped viri and slowed the machine down too much). It runs quite well. I also have a laptop with 500 Meg and it used to run NT quite well until I installed Ubuntu. Now it runs twice as fast.

      3. Dan 55 Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: We interrupt this movie to bring you this important BSOD

        The cinemas running Windows 7 or 8 are going to be annoyed when they lose Media Center when it updates.

    2. matchbx
      Happy

      Re: How about a BSOD on the IMAX screen?

      I sat down in a movie theater once and before the previews even started a BSOD of popped up.... Without missing a beat a guy on the other side hollered out:

      "Did you turn it off and on again?"

  2. Mystic Megabyte
    WTF?

    really?

    I looked closely at the picture in the "5 story screen" article. Just to the right of the screen was a crowd control barrier making the screen approximately 7 ft. tall.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: really?

      "I looked closely at the picture in the "5 story screen" article. Just to the right of the screen was a crowd control barrier making the screen approximately 7 ft. tall."

      You may have looked at THAT picture closely, but it wasn't the right one. Nor did you pay any attention to the text in the article, which described how to view the image you missed. Clue = Facebook's garden.

      1. Mystic Megabyte
        FAIL

        Re: really?

        ooops!

  3. dkjd

    Embedded XP terrifying?

    Why would that be, it is supported until 2019?

    More terrifying is the fact-checking skills of journos imo

    1. Arctic fox

      Re: Embedded XP terrifying?

      "Why would that be, it is supported until 2019?"

      Possibly because we have another three years of this to go?

    2. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: Embedded XP terrifying?

      Exactly. Our local supermarket runs XP on the tills. So long as it is blocked off of the public Internet it shouldn't be "terrifying".

      1. lybad

        Re: Embedded XP terrifying?

        Even more terrifying (to me anyway), is that a sales guy in 3 told me their customer system runs on Windows '98 - and it did indeed look like it.

        In terms of cash machines, a couple of years ago I saw a Bank of Scotland ATM reboot, and start a McAfee antivirus scan....

        1. Darryl

          Re: Embedded XP terrifying?

          That explains why ATMs are so damn slow!!!

    3. Faceless Man

      Re: Embedded XP terrifying?

      Indeed, XP was relatively stable and robust. If they were running embedded Vista, I'd be worried.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bloated System Of Dysfunction

    I only drive-by Vulture Central so I can gawk at this slow-motion train wreck.

    Keep up the trojan work Redmond!

  5. Christian Berger

    I don't understand why people are running ad-signs on Windows

    I mean seriously, there's now software like "Info Beamer" which you can install on a Raspberry Pi and even "Cloud manage" if you'd like. You can write your screens in Lua and playing something like a video is trivial on those.... and if you subscribe to their optional "cloud service" all you need to do is write the system onto SD-cards and just swap your hardware for another Raspberry Pi in case one breaks.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: I don't understand why people are running ad-signs on Windows

      Yeahbut, the advertisers probably do everything in the latest version of Flash. They don't know anything else.

      1. Christian Berger

        Re: I don't understand why people are running ad-signs on Windows

        Hmm that opens a new business model. Just get them a malevolent ad, which hijacks their electronic billboards and stays on them, then, perhaps a year later, make those billboards display your customers ads instead the normal ones. If you don't overdo it, nobody will notice.

      2. Hans 1

        Re: I don't understand why people are running ad-signs on Windows

        >Yeahbut, the advertisers probably do everything in the latest version of Flash. They don't know anything else.

        Yeahbut, the advertisers probably do everything in the last century version of Flash. They don't know anything else.

        TFTFY

    2. Soruk
      Go

      Re: I don't understand why people are running ad-signs on Windows

      Where I work we have a screen showing a slideshow on a screen in our reception area.

      The slideshow started life as a Powerpoint, 1920x1080 screengrabs were taken and the resulting PNGs loaded on to an old 256MB Raspberry Pi 1 running Kodi (and vampiring its power off the TV's USB port). An autoexec.py script ensures the slideshow starts automatically on system startup.

      To make life easier for those who have to update it, the content is supplied on a USB memory stick (VFAT), as if they tried to update the SD card they'd be met with a warning that the card isn't formatted (and would likely nuke the setup).

      It works. It has never crashed. It uses far less power than a dedicated PC sitting there just scrolling through a powerpoint file.

    3. Triggerfish

      Re: I don't understand why people are running ad-signs on Windows

      Big rollout like that is going to cost a fair bit of cash, and take a bit of organisation. If BSOD is infrequent enough then they won't bother.

    4. ChrisBedford

      Re: I don't understand why people are running ad-signs on Windows

      Agreed, especially when I see the awful video performance of computers that should handle Windows at least "OK". A local national chain pharmacy shows some of those "Just for Laughs" candid camera prank videos in amongst the ads, and the jerk-jerk-jerkiness is sometimes too painful to watch. Certain a stripped-down Linux with the right drivers would handle it much better.

  6. Simon Harris

    "This copy of Windows is not genuine"

    I get that on one of my Windows 7 work machines that's non networked.

    If Windows can't call home for a long time it thinks it's not a genuine copy.

    1. James O'Shea

      Re: "This copy of Windows is not genuine"

      I used to get that all the time on an old Toshiba laptop I had. It shipped with Vista, and every so often I'd get the 'not genuine' message, call Microsoft, scream at them, get a new license key, enter it... and everything would be good, for a few months, then it'd display the 'not genuine' message again, and I'd call Microsoft again. After a while the guys in the call center got suspicious and didn't want to hand out a new key; I'd escalate it to a 'supervisor', who would check and see that the 'suspicious' key, and the one before that, and the one before that, etc., were issued by Microsoft after the OEM key had... problems. He'd then issue me a new key. The Toshiba was upgraded to Win 7 pretty much the day Win 7 became available, and for some time showed no problems. It's back saying that Win 7, got direct from Microsoft, is 'not genuine'. And, again, a replacement key lasted for a few months before becoming 'not genuine'. Part of the problem does, indeed, seem to be that I don't connect the Toshiba to the internet any more often than I have to, and whatever frequency that is seems to be not often enough for Microsoft to check on me.

      The Toshiba is now 9, going on 10, years old and has been retired, replaced by a second-hand Apple machine, running OS X 10.9. The Apple system, despite being nearly as old as the Toshiba, is much faster and doesn't try to tell me that it's not 'genuine'. It does nag about updating to 10.10 and 10.11. I ignore the nags. Which are rare, as the Apple also spends a lot of time not being connected to the internet.

      1. Simon Harris

        Re: "This copy of Windows is not genuine"

        I wonder if we could sue Microsoft for slander for insinuating that we've installed knock-off copies of Windows when they're perfectly legit.

        1. Wensleydale Cheese
          Go

          Re: "This copy of Windows is not genuine"

          "I wonder if we could sue Microsoft for slander for insinuating that we've installed knock-off copies of Windows when they're perfectly legit."

          I wondered about that.

          Instead I decided that an OS which randomly disabled itself AND insulted me at the same time wasn't fit for purpose.

          It was the straw that broke the camel's back and I started looking at Linux in earnest.

    2. Faceless Man

      Re: "This copy of Windows is not genuine"

      I first encountered that error on the Windows PC Lab at MS TechEd 2008 in Sydney. As you'd expect, it was a network issue causing all the lab PCs to periodically declare they weren't genuine, but you'd expect that MS might have tried to ensure that their PCs at their big Tech Conference worked properly.

  7. Elmer Phud

    and over at the entertainment industry . . .

    as there are numerous Chinese knock-off of lighting and sound desks, the number of BSOD displayed at gigs, conferences etc. is maybe bigger than you'd think

    1. gobaskof

      Re: and over at the entertainment industry . . .

      Chinese knock off sound desks causing conference interruptions? Windows on supported hardware is normally the culprit. The only conference interruption I have ever had when speaking was at a conference where we couldn't use our own laptops. Adobe reader decided to notify me of a new version 10 mins into a full screen presentation. This, I suppose, is Adobe incompetence not Microsoft, but still it felt like a Genuine Windows Experience™.

      1. ma1010
        Go

        Re: and over at the entertainment industry . . .

        You might want to consider using Linux and LibreOffice Impress instead of Windows and PowerPoint. I've done quite a number of presentations using Impress and have yet to be interrupted by the OS or some idiot program deciding to interrupt what I was doing. In addition, I can use my Android phone to control the computer remotely via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth using the Impress Remote app.

        It just works, and quite well. I'm using a fairly old laptop that bogs down a bit with Win 7, but runs just perfectly with Ubuntu.

        1. Simon Harris

          Re: and over at the entertainment industry . . .

          Although much of the time you're at the mercy of what the conference AV department tell you to use (most of the ones I've presented at, the presentations need to work in PowerPoint), and if you do use your own laptop you usually have to suffer the undignified wait while they try to reroute the video source, find the resolution doesn't match the projector, and then discover all the video clips just appear as a black box or somehow play upside down (I don't know how that even happens, but I saw it at a recent conference- probably configured for the Australians in the audience).

  8. JJKing

    Supported some Lenovo SFF desktops (the ones with the external laptop like power packs) running Vista Enterprise that would get very sad and not boot when the BIOS was updated. Sorry, not a BSOD but was still bloody annoying as we couldn't fix it. At least with a BSOD you have a chance to get it back working again. A BIOS rollback wasn't an option due to the upgrade being required for some forgotten reason.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Andy Long of Exploding Phone drew our attention to this Tweet. It's not a five-storey #fail, but given the sensitivity of data that passes through a store checkout, the persistence of Windows XP is … terrifying."

    Post Office counter machines still use NT4...

  10. Crazy Operations Guy

    Airlines still use XP quite often

    I've had more than a few delayed flights caused by the gate check machines Blue-screening and preventing the gate crew from printing the flight manifests or issuing gate-tickets for stand-by passengers. One of them crashed badly enough at the tiny, tiny airport I was flying out of that they had to fly in a fresh machine from the local hub (The airport's code was EAT, for those that care)

  11. saturnfig

    Sub reddit full of BSODs in public

    https://www.reddit.com/r/pbsod

  12. Matt Bieneman

    Not necessarily the vendor's fault.

    "Someone's ATM vendor seems to be shortcutting on their Windows licenses."

    Not necessarily true; I have seen this happen to authentic, licensed Windows systems. Recently it happened to a Dell computer that actually has the Microsoft holographic sticker on the machine. The machine was purchased directly from Dell; it worked for many years, then Microsoft suddenly decided that it was no longer genuine. It will no longer accept the serial number from that sticker. Microsoft has phone numbers and websites available to help solve this problem. Their phone system accepts the serial number from the holographic sticker but then gives you a very long serial number that the Microsoft system will not accept. The web site no longer functions at all. This is the Microsoft "Genuine Advantage"!

  13. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Piccadilly Circus - The Curve

    One of the best known illuminated advertising hoardings in the world has also succumbed to Windows error messages. There's a well-known one of the Coca Cola ad being defaced by one.

    The question is whether Land Securities will be pursuing Microsoft for rental charges

  14. Sam Adams the Dog

    Apple Ad?

    Some years back, there was a BSOD displayed on the large sign on the Ernst & Young building, high above Times Square. We all joked that it was secretly an Apple ad.

  15. fishbone

    I was getting the not genuine copy message for the last two weeks at a federal government work area.

  16. Hans 1
    Windows

    D'oh

    Windows is not Genuine, it is a Apple OS ][ rip-off.

    MS? TFTFY

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I don't think...

    ..MS are going to be embarrased in the slightest over all these BSOD photos.

    They are just going to be proud that their O/S is everywhere.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Screensaver?

    Any chance of combining all these BSOD photos into a screen saver?

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