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How To Create Windows Blue Screen Of Death

by pm on 27/12/07 at 5:10 pm

This is an interesting article source from HowToGeek.com – ‘Kill Windows with the Blue Screen of Death in 3 Keystrokes that make me think of “How To Create Windows Blue Screen Of Death“.

What is Blue Screen O Death?

Blue Screen of Death (also known as a stop error, BSOD or bluescreen) is an error screen displayed by certain operating systems, most notably Microsoft Windows, after encountering a critical system error which can cause the system to shut down to prevent damage. Bluescreens can be caused by poorly written device drivers, faulty memory, a corrupt Registry, or incompatible DLLs. Bluescreens have been present in all Windows-based operating systems since Windows 3.1; OS/2 and MS-DOS suffered the Black Screen of Death, and early builds of Windows Vista displayed the Red Screen of Death after a boot loader error.

Let’s start here:

Open up regedit(click Windows button -> Run -> Type regedit) and then browse down to one of these keys, depending on your keyboard type:

USB Keyboard

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\Parameters

PS/2 Keyboard

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters

Right-click on the right-hand pane and add a new DWORD key named CrashOnCtrlScroll, giving it a value of 1.

Reboot your computer and when it starts back up you can trigger the Blue Screen of Death by using the following keyboard shortcut:

Hold down Right Ctrl and hit Scroll Lock twice

Familiar screen?

To remove this “feature” you can just delete the registry key and then restart your computer again.

Note: This isn’t a bug, it’s a “feature” in Windows that is designed to let users trigger a crash dump for testing purposes. There’s even a whole Microsoft KB article on the subject.

Enjoy!