TECH THURSDAY
Which horror movie am I writing about? The one where the vulnerable woman, probably wearing pajamas, is sitting at her desk, with her dogs slumbering in peace at her feet. You can see what’s getting ready to happen, and you just want to scream: No, don’t do that!! Can’t you see how dangerous it is?
Then you see it: The BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.
This is a movie many of us have been seeing lately. The BSD as it’s known among its victims happens unexpectedly, and leaves behind no explanation.
Though I have sung the praises of Vista (crazy, I know), the BSD seems to descend on it more than on other operating systems. I have read a few forums about it but like other supernatural phenomena, no one really understands what’s happening.
Here’s what happens: You’re working at your computer, and you try to, say visit a Web page, save a document or open a program. Instead of doing what you’ve so politely requested, your computer refuses to act and then, when you’re not looking, your screen takes on a horrifying shade of html-blue and gives you a bunch of numbers, error codes and maybe even a message that says “These errors may be fatal.”
In my case, I had a “Failure to complete crash dump” message, too.
I was so spooked by the BSD that I cradled it like a sick child and took it the Emergency Room at Best Buy, avoiding restarting it or turning it off, just leaving it running there in the passenger seat. Once at the store, the Geek Squad tech took one look and said, No idea what’s going on, and restarted it.
He ran an error disk to read the “dump” files (I think that’s a file your computer creates when it crashes), but said he couldn’t find any reason for the BSD. He recommended reformatting … and reinstalling the operating system, software and everything.
I said, Thanks, but no thanks. The BSD — like the “pale green pants with nothing inside them” in the Dr. Seuss book — may not be so scary after all.
“Blue Screen of Death” … love it! Someone should write a book (someone smarter than me probably already has) that serves as a guide to all of the meaningless error-message drivel that pops up on computer screens. I just had one on a NYTimes article that said “Stack overflow at line: 873.” What’s that supposed to mean?
Sometimes for fun I will Google these error messages … they’re like UFOs: No one … but no one … can explain some of them. Hey, maybe they are alien messages … should we be paying better attention? That would make it an entirely different movie … Invasion of the BSDs!!
BSD. Get it all the time. Lost my entire email history a month ago. Found it again; just a broken link away. At least, when I used to have a mac, they were honest about it: there was a little bomb symbol that popped up on the screen!