• JAFO (unregistered)

    Besides screen shots, I thought I'd pass along a handy tip I found in the not-so-distant past. Give focus on a dialog box and ctrl-C should copy the text out of it. Makes googling your error message much easier.

  • (cs) in reply to Dave

    Dave:
    Personally, I'm a big fan of the following, when Windows XP suddenly and inexplicably reboots, destroying all my unsaved work, and comes back with this dialog: "The system has recovered from a serious error." Uh, no you didn't! You crashed and burned on a serious error!

    The most likely cause of this error is a driver bug. The second most likely cause is bad or overclocked hardware. Do click 'Send Error Report' so MS can analyze the problem and, if confirmed to be a driver or hardware error, pass the issue onto the appropriate vendor.

  • (cs) in reply to Drak
    Drak:
    I sometimes get an error box popping up really briefly when I shutdown my machine saying that svchost.exe crashed. I don't mind, it doesn't happen very often.

    Then all of a sudden a few weeks ago when I start my machine I get all those 'Send your error to Microsoft' boxes popping up for errors that occurred up to half a year ago... WTF. Delayed error reporting?

    I have psychic powers... up until a few weeks ago, your regular account was not an administrative account, and now it is, right?

    If service processes crash, XP and 2003 will only report them to administrators.

    Longhorn is going to need a way of saying, 'I'm not an administrator for security purposes, but treat me as one for information purposes.'

  • (cs) in reply to dragorn

    No, the WTF here is that you didn't follow the instructions and look up ASD in Windows Help.  I've been hit by that before.  From Help, you get a link to a program that will remove the device from the ASD stop list.

  • (cs) in reply to FrostCat

    Ooops, forgot to quote the post I was replying to.  It was the one starting "I work for a .edu"

  • (cs) in reply to EdwinR
    Anonymous:

    A dutch medical application once gave me this and I saved it because it was a good laugh:
    [image]
    The rather boring explanation is that the dutch designer/developer did not know the word 'Gender'...


    Gender not being allowed being better how? ^o)

    Quite reminicent of the Irish Government Equality Authority's recent advertising campaign with posters saying "SEX IS ILLEGAL" with a tiny-fonted "discrimination" after the SEX, and "HOMOSEXUALITY IS ILLEGAL" with a tiny "discrimination on the grounds of" at the top.
  • (cs) in reply to EdwinR
    Anonymous:

    The rather boring explanation is that the dutch designer/developer did not know the word 'Gender'...

    The Dutch designer was quite correct, albeit with somewhat poor phrasing, if he was talking about people. People have a sex, "male" or "female." Nouns and some other grammatical items in some languages, have a gender, "masculine," "feminine" or "neuter."
  • (cs) in reply to Mike Dimmick
    Mike Dimmick:
    Drak:
    I sometimes get an error box popping up really briefly when I shutdown my machine saying that svchost.exe crashed. I don't mind, it doesn't happen very often.

    Then all of a sudden a few weeks ago when I start my machine I get all those 'Send your error to Microsoft' boxes popping up for errors that occurred up to half a year ago... WTF. Delayed error reporting?

    I have psychic powers... up until a few weeks ago, your regular account was not an administrative account, and now it is, right?

    If service processes crash, XP and 2003 will only report them to administrators.

    Longhorn is going to need a way of saying, 'I'm not an administrator for security purposes, but treat me as one for information purposes.'

    Nope, I've always  been administrator (I'm the only one on the machine, as it is my home box.) I think it's something one of the windows updates caused to happen as it just happened on my laptop as well which I don't update that often.

    Drak

  • (cs) in reply to JAFO

    Anonymous:
    Besides screen shots, I thought I'd pass along a handy tip I found in the not-so-distant past. Give focus on a dialog box and ctrl-C should copy the text out of it. Makes googling your error message much easier.

    Very handy! Didn't know that...

    Drak

  • BogusDude (unregistered) in reply to Mike Dimmick
    Mike Dimmick:

    The most likely cause of this error is a driver bug. The second most likely cause is bad or overclocked hardware. Do click 'Send Error Report' so MS can analyze the problem and, if confirmed to be a driver or hardware error, pass the issue onto the appropriate vendor.


    Funk that ! I'm not sending anything to microsoft. I like my privacy, thank you.

    P.S.
    All operating systems suck. Windoze sucks more !
    The greatest oxymoron ever: Microsoft Works


  • edac (unregistered) in reply to dhromed

    I guess almost none of you guys had worked with the Intel C++ compiler where catastrophic errors are quite common thing:

    e:\sdk\maxsdk40\include\Max.h(23): catastrophic error: could not open source file "ctl3d.h"  #include <ctl3d.h><ctl3d.h></ctl3d.h>

    Over and over again... :)

  • (cs) in reply to BogusDude

    Anonymous:

    All operating systems suck. Windoze sucks more !

     

    IMHO Windows only sucks because of the variety of hardware components that are available. Where are the good old days of the C64, Amiga 500 and ofcourse the Guru (who meditated quite a bit sometimes).

    If you don't get the Guru part you never had an A500 (or it never crashed :)

    Drak

  • (cs) in reply to edac
    I guess almost none of you guys had worked with the Intel C++ compiler where catastrophic errors are quite common thing:
    The best compiler error messages *ever* were from MPW Shell, an old (but very, very useful) development environment on Mac OS. Here are a few gems:

    "Can't cast a void type to type void (because the ANSI spec. says so, that's why)"

    "Too many errors on one line (make fewer)"

    "This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message"

    You can find more here
  • (cs) in reply to Drak
    Drak:

    Anonymous:

    All operating systems suck. Windoze sucks more !

     

    IMHO Windows only sucks because of the variety of hardware components that are available. Where are the good old days of the C64, Amiga 500 and ofcourse the Guru (who meditated quite a bit sometimes).

    If you don't get the Guru part you never had an A500 (or it never crashed :)

    Drak



    The 1000 and 2000 meditated from time to time too, you know. My only real complaint about AmigaDOS (and this is from my original floppy-only configuration perpective) was having to shuffle discs around to turn the darned thing off. "Ooooh, I can't remember how to quit. Can you remind me?" Whiny machine. If it didn't do dissolves between two NTSC video-in channels while overlaying 3D graphics from Caligari, I'd've thrown the darned thing out.....
  • (cs) in reply to DreamerFi

    years ago, i got this one from the Gould UTX/32 C compiler:

    I strongly object to casting <type1> to <typ2>.

    I think it was pointer to int and char it didn't like.  How many of you have offended a compiler?

  • (cs) in reply to daveb

    Anonymous:
    Best one I ever saw was on an old VMS system that was chugging away in a server room I was working in. The message was (I paraphrase)

    There is no tape in the backup tape drive, your backup will take an indefinite amount of time..


    Note that NOTHING ever failed on VMS :)

    The only problem we had with the VMS system that we ran was the fact we had a very long printer cable connecting a printer in a different room to the mainframe.  Every now and then, the printer would spit out garbage.  Come to find out, the cable was run in the elevator shaft and every time the elevator was run, it would create EMI and distort the output.  Took a while to track down that problem.[:D]

  • Tony (unregistered)

    There's actually a site that I spotted some time ago which lets you design your own fake popups of this kind :-)

    http://atom.smasher.org/error/

  • Paul (unregistered)

    UniFace used to popup the most usefull error "A software or hardware error occured"

  • (cs) in reply to cm5400
    cm5400:

    Anonymous:
    Best one I ever saw was on an old VMS system that was chugging away in a server room I was working in. The message was (I paraphrase)

    There is no tape in the backup tape drive, your backup will take an indefinite amount of time..


    Note that NOTHING ever failed on VMS :)

    The only problem we had with the VMS system that we ran was the fact we had a very long printer cable connecting a printer in a different room to the mainframe.  Every now and then, the printer would spit out garbage.  Come to find out, the cable was run in the elevator shaft and every time the elevator was run, it would create EMI and distort the output.  Took a while to track down that problem.[:D]

    Reminds me of a story my father told me. He used to be the onsite tech rep at a USMC war gaming site. There was a plotter that did what you describe - worked most of the time, occasionally output garbage. He traced voltages and resoldered components and did everything the manual and his experience (former electronics & computer instructor for USMC) told him to do. Very late in the evening, after hours of failing to even reproduce the problem, he was resting for a few minutes, thinking about the steps he'd taken when the AC kicked off. The penny dropped - flaky power. He added a voltage regulator to the circuit and all was good.

  • (cs)

    Engrish.com has a few more...

    Do you feel ENJOY !!! Sorry for Disturb

  • (cs) in reply to subliminable

    The most funny error message I got happened when my harddisk was completely full so I wanted to delete some files. Oh, well... I was young and inexperienced back then so I couldn't understand why Windows came with an error message telling me that it could not delete some file simply because there wasn't enough diskspace...

    Later, I discovered that I wasn't the only one with that problem. [:)] It's probably well-documented now on the Internet... [:)]

  • (cs) in reply to Katja Bergman

    No one thought my state tax website trying to charge $401.646 to my credit card was worth commenting on... oh well..

  • Chris N (unregistered)

    [image]

    <FONT face="Courier New">

    This was an error a research group at my school got on a Cluster service they were running.  This screenshot is not mine, but this was the same error that we got...

    When all else fails.. Blame France!

    </FONT>
  • Markyboy (unregistered) in reply to FrostCat

    I have had a run in with the mysterious "should not see me" process before too. Its very occasionally when I shut down XP pro. The "this process is not responding" dialog will pop up... but the name of the process is "should not see me." I just hope its a windows thing and not something nasty...

  • (cs) in reply to cjs

    People have gender too.

    See http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/sexandgender.html for an explanation of the difference..

    The designer still probably almost certainly right though, there are very few times when a hospital would need to record someones gender..

  • Gareth (unregistered) in reply to zhasper

    That first screen shot is an InstallAnywhere installer.  They haven't disbled the minimize button because InstallAnywhere doesn't provide a way of doing this.

    The real WTF is why the install would fail if they minimize they installer ...

  • olene (unregistered) in reply to pbounaix

    <FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #c0c0c0">"just as an fyi, whenever i've had explorer.exe issues, once i've killed him, i go to Start->Run and start explorer.exe manually."</FONT>

    That's not really possible, since explorer.exe creates the start menu, along with the taskbar.

  • Troy (unregistered) in reply to olene
    Anonymous:

    <FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #c0c0c0">"just as an fyi, whenever i've had explorer.exe issues, once i've killed him, i go to Start->Run and start explorer.exe manually."</FONT>

    That's not really possible, since explorer.exe creates the start menu, along with the taskbar.

    <FONT face="Courier New">Incorrect location to do it explained here, but it is possible to recover from a blank desktop. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, choose Task Manager. File, New Task, type explorer.exe in the box, click okay and you're back up and running without a reboot.</FONT>

  • (cs) in reply to Troy
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    <font style="background-color: rgb(192, 192, 192);">"just as an fyi, whenever i've had explorer.exe issues, once i've killed him, i go to Start->Run and start explorer.exe manually."</font>

    That's not really possible, since explorer.exe creates the start menu, along with the taskbar.

    <font face="Courier New">Incorrect location to do it explained here, but it is possible to recover from a blank desktop. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, choose Task Manager. File, New Task, type explorer.exe in the box, click okay and you're back up and running without a reboot.</font>


    That's all very well and good until you get braindead sysadmins who disable New Task in Task manager and disable access to the property page with option to start folders in a seperate window and configure all the computers so they crash on a regular basis.  And yes, I work at a place like that.
  • Isvara (unregistered)

    I think my favourite error so far is: "There was not enough space for the"

    Sadly, I don't remember which application it was.

  • Tim (unregistered) in reply to Markyboy

    Isn't this a result of the Microsoft Installer not being updated to its latest version or something? I remember we were having problems like this at work and someone pointed me to websites talking about this and that turned out to be the problem. I know that seems improbable, but for us, that's what it was.

  • Olga (unregistered) in reply to Jake Vinson

    lol.  thats funny.  well for me it is.  once i got a pop up and it said

     

        Don't  you hate pop ups?  Click here to get a pop up blocker!

     

    I was like, "Stupid pop ups!!

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