It’s Friday, bring on the bourbon! See? Even your computer’s got the spirit. Ooooh, it just called you a lightweight pussy, too.
Submitted by: Steve via Submission Page
Moar Work Related Lulz. And By “Work” I mean Drinking.
Ninja Beer
Paging Mr. Jameson
Soup of the Day
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Copy & paste this:
Ha ha, he got hexd!
Aww damn, me avatar!
Ha ha, he got hexd!
I thought it was German at first…
How do you do that? I used to change the Win 3.x and 9x startup/shutdown screens all the time…
Not very difficult, actually. It’s not even photoshopped: it can just be a made-up screen.
Funny anyway.
As an IT tech myself, I’ve actually had that happen to me. Same sort of garbled text. Turned out it was a bad stick of RAM corrupting the text.
I was about to post exactly the same thing Xenor.
I had that issue with a 386 and it told me that my “floopy di$h drove” was busted. Changed the RAM, win!
Our HPs do this at least once a year. For kicks, sometimes it’s the RAM, sometimes the slot, and sometimes the RAM has managed to come loose even with the clips.
I’m also an IT Professional (surprise). Not only have I had bad RAM cause this, but a few years back I had a corrupt processor do the same thing.
Hardware idiosyncracies FTW
So is Fetwgrkifg Cthulhu’s younger brother?
Nah. Beowulf’s cousin.
Well it seems that in all the garbled letters it’s the same bit that’s wrong – bit 4. So Iguess
Well it seems that in all the garbled letters it’s the same bit that’s wrong – bit 4. I’ve seen this before with bad RAM, like xenor said. I wonder why some of the letters aren’t garbled though (for example the M in Safe Mode)
If it’s garbling it even pseudo-randomly, it could have just hit the right pseudo-random number for that bit on those words.
PCs have 32 or 64 bit words. This is something with 32 bit words, as the errors are in every 4th character. The M in Safe Mode is the 10th character on the line, which isn’t divisible by 4.
Nice try, but you still have to store the other 3 non-modulo-4 characters in the same memory do you not. And any one of those could be wrong. Plus who knows what offset the text is here, it may not necessarily be on the word boundary at the start of a line.
In any case that just shifts the error position by +2 bytes. So instead of bit 4, it’s bit 20 out of the dword.
Tch. Noobs.
May also be a bad connection on the PCI/AGP line if it’s an older machine, which could lead to jitters in a variety of places, but with the same bit of a dword/qword, given that they’re parallel (and 32 / 64 bit data bus) connection standards.
That happened to me once, when my crappy ATI video card died. Stupid greedy jerks wouldn’t give me a refund because “The damage was related to normal wear and tear”
Very nice, very nice ) Somebody has too much time in their hands
Is it a hack or not?
It could be but probably not. I’ve seen it happen before too.
Would be a piece of cake to open up the relevant windows system file with a hex editor, particularly if you “borrowed” the disk out of the PC (or had a bootable liveCD) and just screw around with some letters. It’s even easier to make up a whole new boot menu that looks the same as the normal windows one with some differences. All you need is a cameraphone screencap, notepad (to make the menu) and msconfig (to allow use of it). Can prep it on another machine and insert it via memory stick (or hidden network share…) whilst the mark is getting coffee.
What would score extra points is if this is on a Linux box
But yeah, the wierdness I’ve seen thanks to bad RAM. Usually doesn’t manifest as screen errors, but can do. Generally windows starts breaking down (or breaking up) in bizarre ways instead as the vast majority of RAM is given over to code and graphics.
OLLDDDD
This can also be the result of a bad video card. Even the very basic textual information gets garbled going through a bad one. It probably gives complete garbage to the monitor upon booting to windows and hard locks.
It’s caused by bad RAM. Typically on the display adapter, unless integrated to the motherboard.
Had this same problem at work a couple of days ago. Turned out to be a bad video card.
Bad ram on motherboard or video card.
Or, someone really hex-edited your OS
This is caused by a bad video card.
If you have integrated graphics that shares your RAM, then it can also be bad RAM as well.
its not IT, it was a virus or something, and was sent to geek squad city. Notice the agent in the reflection?
Had the same thing at work last year. It was the video card at fault for me as well. Odd to see it’s not such a rare thing.
I took a photo of the entire screen when it happened though: http://www.tim.id.au/blog/2009/03/31/what-video-corruption-looks-like/
We had this type of thing popping up at work all the time on a batch of pc’s with bad video cards. Replaced the cards and fixed the problem. . . at least until the new cards went out too, anyway.
I had this happen to me when I was adding RAM to my new computer. When I saw this, my first word was “FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU…”
it’s just welsh you guys
Delightful, this is bit 0 on a 32-bit bus being stuck. I.e. wath vs with would have been 105 vs 97 == 0b1101001 vs 0b1100001
I don’t know about all of you but my Wandows always starts up Ngrmadly
I use wAndows all the time. Great program.