Top Thirteen Error Screens

Ahh, the error screen. Where would we be without ’em? Whether it’s a Blue Screen of Death or a simple error pop-up from an application, they’re a required part of computing, but undoubtedly one of the most annoying aspects of computing as well. The Technologizer blog takes a look at their personal “top thirteen” greatest error messages of all time, and some are not going to be that surprising.

The BSOD is of course there, but did you realize there’s also a “Red Screen of Death”? It’s one that originally came with Windows Longhorn – before it became Vista – although there’s a slight chance it still could be in the retail version, but it would be incredibly rare. I’ve caught only one while testing Longhorn, and what a sweet day it was.

Other picks from their list go back as far as the eighties with the Guru Meditation, a random error for the Commodore Amiga that had the same overall effect of the BSOD, though it was red on black, rather than white on blue. It of course also included useless codes that meant nothing to the layman. The list is quite good overall… and I can’t really think of any that are missing off hand.

According to Wikipedia, some beta versions of Longhorn–the operating system that became Windows Vista–crashed with a full-screen error message that was red rather than the more familiar blue. Wikipedia seems to say that the final version of Vista can die with a red color scheme when the boot loader has problems, too. I’m relieved to say I’ve never encountered that, as far as I can remember.