Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

(Column) - If you mention the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) to a Windows user, they will probably begin to sigh and groan, and they may even shudder at the very thought of seeing one of these horrific images on their computer monitor. If you haven't experienced a Blue Screen of Death yet, then you're not a true Windows user.

As you probably already know, you'll only see the infamous BSOD if Windows experiences an error beyond what it can recover by itself. One of the unfortunate things about these fatal errors is that the common user never really knows exactly what happened, or why it happened. Recovering from one can be difficult, and sometimes you'll lose the information that you were currently working on. Yeah - that's not fun.

The Blue Screen of Death was coined from Microsoft's misfortunes with stability issues in Windows, and it's become a cultural thing. Many of us have grown up with the BSOD, and merchandise and endless parodies have arisen because of it.

One of the most amusing things to me is when I see a BSOD in public. So many of the devices that we interact with on a daily basis are powered by Windows, and because of that, it's a wonder that things are still working in a somewhat functional manner. Among other places, I've personally seen the Blue Screen of Death in airports and on ATM machines. In addition, my home PC became a haven for them back in the Windows 95 and 98 days.

Next