While I understand that there are many more of these errors on PCs than Macs, I thought it might be fun to see what weird error messages everyone has encountered along the way that are funny, stupid, or just plain weird. I have a few pictures that will hopefully turn out of some that have appeared on my computer, but what prompted this was a random crash of IE today.

While running IE, I clicked on a link and an error box popped up, telling me that IE had encountered normal day to day business but was crashing anyways, and asked if I wanted to send an error report. I clicked OK, since it usually trys to attempt to tell you what the error was. Once that new window had opened, I received the following extremely helpful reply:

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/response.aspx?...4141e9&SID=1130

And, in case the link times out or something:



The parts in bold give me both a detailed analysis of exactly what happened, followed by the exact procedure I need to follow to remedy the problem. Despite the fact that Microsoft has absolutely no idea why they can't create a stable anything, what I find really amusing is that their recommended solution involves "upgrading" to Service Pack 2...something that might be doable if I wasn't running Windows 98. I'm thinking about emailing Microsoft to tell them that I am having difficulties in working with their "solution". Might be interesting to see what they say when I tell them I can't install SP2 no matter what I try.

One of my personal favorites is this (a blue screen of death on Windows):



Please note: I actually did get that message once!

http://broken.typepad.com/ - What is your wife's current marital status? Widowed.

What just peeved me today was the fact that on dual-sided DVD's, the side that says "Widescreen" is the side that goes up, so the widescreen data is actually on the bottom, but the label is on the top. WHY, GOD, WHY!? Why do you do this to me?

Do you normally put movies in the drive with the name of the movie pointing down? I don't quite understand the problem you're having with it being the way it is.

One of my favorites sites to browse Computer Stupidity . There is one entry about a spell checker. Someone typed in something like 'Windows 98, ME and Linux' and the spell checker suggested 'Windows 98, Linux and I' would be better.

A lot of the stuff is OLD, but still very funny.

Here's a Mac OS X one for a change!

I once had something very strange happen on a Panther installation (10.3.7 I think it was). Random letters disappeared from all static text fields and window titles, and the letters that disappeared changed every time even after opening/closing the exact same window. Take a look:

http://pcheese.ferazel.net/external/missingletters/

Yes, those are real screenshots, but I've only seen something like that once.

PWNED
(Thanks go to ToLazyToMakeAnAccount for many of these)

It's not an error message, but I woke my computer up a few days ago and it locked up without giving the password window. I rebooted and it sat looking for a system folder. I booted again (Off of my external firewire drive) ran DiskWarrior, but the Drive (The internal one on my PowerBook Ti 800) wasn't on the list.
I looked in the system profiler and it had no data for the drive's connection (as though there was nothing pluged in where the HD goes. After trying to find and mount the drive the the Terminal I shut the computer down for a while (20 seconds or so) and when I rebooted off the Firewire drive the old HD was back again.
DiskWarrior found no errors and the S.M.A.R.T. check came up clean. No error message, just a disappearing/ reappearingHD. Does that sound like a problem, even though the S.M.A.R.T. check came up clean?

MalkContent

It sounds related to booting off a firewire drive. I've had some bad experiences with that (mostly relating to firewirebidges quitting, or wires getting unplugged).

My word of advice would be not to confuse your firmware so much by booting off of completely diffrent volumes frequrently. Though its unlikely that anything bad will or could happen, not taking the risk is even better than doing so.

But beyond that, It sounds like a freak incident.

I don't really boot of off the Firewire drive very often, only to do the things I would have to boot off of a CD to do (rather than booting off of the DiskWarrior CD, then off of the TechTool CD, etc.). The only reason I resorted to the firewire drive this time is because the computer would not boot off of the internal, and when i booted using the Option key (I forgot to mention this before) the internal drive wasn't listed.
Like I said, not really a message but kind of strange. And only because the drive came back. Time for a new computer just in case...

MalkContent

EDIT: What's a firewire bridge by the way? Is it like a wireless bridge to a wired router?

A firewire bridge is a type of wireless firewire adapter, but with greater range, as it uses the newer protocol.
Well, that's what I thought, anyway, until I read this:
http://www.barefeats.com/fire14.htm
So, um, maybe it has something to do with wireless hard drives, too.

Well, what I was talking about was an adapter that connects a harddrive's interface to a firewire chain. ALL external firewire drives are normal (usually IDE) harddrives in a case (instead of inside your comptuer). The actual drive is the same, but the firewire bridge (or adapter depending on what you call it) connects the normal drive to the firewire bus of your computer.

Oh! Kind of how like Serial Attached SCSI card *bridges* between the past and the future?

Rounding errors are cool, like trying to make an application that does the following

int i=0

while i!=1
i = i + 0.1
display i (I'm not using a real language here)
end while

Depending on language (some can handle this), it will add 0.1 until i=1... then keep going. It's actually impossible to convert 0.1 into a binary number, it's a non-terminating number (whatever those are called), thus your result isn't exactly 1 at any point, even though it will display 1 at some point

That's why windows managed to show a 9.1000000000000000000000001 (I didn't bother counting the zeros).

As for the "Windows 98, Linux and I" thing, that is the correct grammer. It's a spell checker, not a mind reader

Was there an error message when your spell checker failed to catch this one?

When I arrived in Kuwait, we had a lot of downtime. I had my 1st Gen iPod and it was being VERY weird. It wouldn't start sometimes, and sometimes it would just sit at the Apple logo for hours on end. Well, when it did that, I would just plug it in, and walk away. Come back later and it would work. The one time it didn't work, I just put it away in my foot locker and let it be. Took it out the next day, bam, no problem, it just worked™. My friend, who owns an iBook(a rarity in the Army) became convinced that Apple puts little 'things' inside their products that fixes themselves. Don't worry- he wasn't serious, but it was damn funny.

Now the whole damn thing is just kaput- all the songs and data are gone. I haven't touched it since then because I am waiting to get access to either A) my wifes PB or my friends iBook.

Window popped up:

"Would you like to restart now or in 10...9...8...?"

You could click "OK' or it forced a restart in 10 seconds. Windows 98...

That is just after installing 95/98, right?



Now that's funny.

Personally, every time Windows does something stupid (which happens often to me) I take a screenshot, regardless of the owner of the computer. There is just one thing that I do not have a picture of, somewhere, so I'll just tell you. This PC used to do it in many different ways, but seems to have stabalized lately. Whenever I shutdown, at the time where it's supposed to have the Windows logo infront of the clouds, it instead puts garbage graphics and static, except for about an ich along the bottom, which stays normal. Then when it says "It is now safe toturn off your computer.", it instead canges the previous picture of random garbage to orange garbage, with orange and white clouds on the bottom.

Also on that computer, about once a month, when starting up, instead of a font, I just get verticle lines for all Windows fonts (not DOS or games). And it isn't one line per character, like you'd expect, it's about three lines per five characters. Nothing fixes it execpt restarting.

For the Mac:

I've only used 9.2 long enough to encounter any errors. The only true error was when I was using it for about the third time after it had been on a long trip. Suddenly, after just quitting EVN or something, I noticed an icon or two gone from the desktop. They may have been aliases, I can't remember, but I ended up looking for them on the hardrive somewhere, may have been System somewhere (In Windows, you can easily manage to drag icons off the screen, but they are just as easily found in Windows\Desktop||System\Desktop). Upon looking through the drive, I noticed that files were disappering all over. I remember looking in a game folder, finding most of the files gone, closing the folder, finding the folder gone, etc.. Thinking something terrible had happened, I just shut it off. Turning it back on, everything was just like normal again, except the Launcher is about 7500 pixels in length, and non-resizable, although the width is resizable.

I happened on something funny while testing my code for a time delayed AppleScript. Type this into Script Editor and run:

Yes.

I had an error message where I couldn't figure out how to change some kind of a view setting... in Word or something... The message said, "Error, adjust the 'view' in the 'view' menu" Course, that menu was nested like 6 levels down somewhere. Always.

Windows Add/Remove Software - definitions for "frequency of use" - from thisisbroken.com

That sounds an awful lot like the Sasser virus:

It is.

Then there was this one Windoze ME one that refers to USB 2.0's backwards compatibility with the previous two versions as a problem.

It was actually during an install of Windows 98 "Special" edition. There was no point - it finished installing a bunch of packets or drivers or something... Windows...

that was great.

That is not a virus. I got it just yesterday while installing 98 freshly. Well, I guess you could say it's a virus then...

It has to be the best Windows warning ever.

That happened on my XP computer. I was up in the middle of the night when some sort of scheduled mantinence runs, and it just popped in front of what I was doing, with a little countdown for it to restart the computer. I even popped open the taskmanager and killed every task I didnt recognise, and it killed the dialogue box, but the damned system still restarted itself automatically.

Instead of closing the programs, just run msconfig. Also, do you really need the maintinence wizard thing?

See this thread for info on the worst error message on PocketPC.

Just bring up a cmd prompt and run "shutdown -a"

Usually does the trick for me.

I found this one cleaning out some old stuff on my computer. It had popped up multiple random times while I was programming PICs on Windows computers over the summer…

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