The blue screen of death*

One day, my advisor was complaining that his computer was "broken". When I asked him to explain, I was impressed to hear him use the term "blue screen of death," because I did not think he knew what that was. According to him, every time he booted his machine, it went straight to BSOD, and he didn't know what to do about it. That sounds like a rather serious problem, of course, and I immediately tried to remember if we had a Windows install disc around, because booting to that and trying to repair Windows was about the only thing I could think of to do.

But first, I wanted to see this happen. He said it went straight to BSOD, but I had never heard of that happening, and thought it might flash something on the screen first that might give a clue as to what was happening.

So he showed me his computer, and the screen was blue. However, it was definitely NOT the blue screen of death - it was just a blue screen, a soft, low saturation hue that I immediately recognized as the default background color for Windows XP. It turns out I was correct, my advisor DOESN'T know what the BSOD is.

On this particular computer, I happen to know, booting up takes the user to the regular XP login screen, which is the default background with a dialog box in the middle. The box, however, was nowhere to be found. It's then that I remembered that this computer has two monitors connected to it, and the one I was looking at was on the right. The one of the left was blank. I turned it on. The dialog box appeared.

"Oh my God!" my advisor exclaimed behind me, "What did you do? You're a genius! How did you fix it?" I decided not to bother explaining. He wouldn't have understood.

*This post was written by another graduate student who worked with my stupid advisor.