Screen of death
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In many computer operating systems, a special type of error message will display onscreen when the system has experienced a fatal error. Computer users have dubbed these messages screens of death as they typically result in unsaved work being lost and often indicate serious problems with the system's hardware or software. Screens of death are usually the result of a kernel panic, although the terms are frequently used interchangeably. Most screens of death are displayed on an even background color with a message advising the user to restart the computer.
Notable screens of death
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- The Blue Screen of Death (also called BSOD, Stop error, or bluescreen) is a common name for a screen displayed by the Microsoft Windows operating system when a system error occurs.
- A Black Screen of Death is a failure mode of Microsoft Windows 3.x.
- A Red Screen of Death appears in early beta versions of Windows Vista and is also the colour of the fatal error screen on the Playstation 3.
- The Purple Screen of Death is used by VMware ESX Server, a server virtualization product by VMware, Inc. It is displayed in the event of a fatal kernel error. The screen provides error codes that can be used for debugging purposes.
- A kernel panic is used primarily by Unix and Unix-like operating systems: the Unix equivalent of Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death. It is used to describe a fatal error from which the operating system cannot recover.
- A Sad Mac is a symbol used by older-generation Apple Macintosh computers, starting with the original Macintosh 128K, to indicate a severe hardware or software problem that prevented startup from occurring successfully. A similar symbol exists for the iPod.
- The Bomb icon is a symbol that was displayed when a "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) program had an application crash.
- Guru Meditation is the name of the error that occurred on early versions of the Amiga computers when they crashed.
Other screens of death
The following refers to screens of death that are not based upon computer operating systems and appear instead in other media.
- A White Screen of Death appears on several different operating systems[citation needed], CMS[1] and BIOSes, including Apple iPhones and iPods.[2]
- A Yellow Screen of Death occurs when an ASP.NET web application encounters a problem and crashes.[3]
- A Green Screen of Death appears when Motorolla PVRs crash prior to rebooting.
- A Pink Screen of Death appears when Nvidia GTX 280 or 260 crashes which trying to run a program that requires heavy matrix operation.
See also
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Screens of death.
References
- ^ "Drupal White Screen of Death".
- ^ Ulanoff, Lance (2006-09-12). "The Apple iPod's White Screen of Death". PCMag.com. Retrieved 2011-05-23.
- ^ Busoli, Simone (November 15, 2007). "ELMAH - Error Logging Modules And Handlers".[self-published source?]