1st May 2001
Coming from the "One Blue Over the Cuckoo's Nest" Department, Shannon McGrath crashes his way into your heart. Windows instability nightmares are about to disappear -- we hope. XP should be an improvement for the mainstream consumer and professional. Assuming, of course, we can get over that silly protection scheme they're imposing on us. Knowing what I know about the beta, Microsoft built XP on top of a very robust Windows 2000 (NT) kernel. That's good! Forget about 3.1, 95, 98, and ME already. True operating systems will crash -- on your command. Not really, but I needed a segue. Here's one surefire way to get the dreaded blue screen of death in Windows 2000. Fire up the Registry editor and flail to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ System \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ i8042prt \ Parameters. Create a new DWORD data type and rename it "CrashOnCtrlScroll" (sans quotes). Give this a value of 1 and reboot your system. Now, whenever you hold down the rightmost CTRL key and tap the Scroll Lock key twice, you'll instantaneously generate a genuine BSOD. Now that's power! Uh...