It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

Everyone knows and hates a blue screen of death, but blue isn’t the only color for the job:

Wikipedia has a list and while it’s very interesting, I think it tries too hard to fit anything into a formula. Can this below really be called a white screen of death?

The most terrifying screens of death might be black, anyway. Even Macs have one:

Earlier PC users would shudder thinking of this black screen of death, which didn’t mean trouble in the moment – it meant trouble forever:

Over at The New Old Thing, Raymond Chen shares a story from the 1990s of the worst case scenario: a black screen of death showing… nothing at all. As always, Chen shares some fascinating technical underpinnings:

If you hold a PC’s power button for 12 seconds, it will turn off at the hardware level without notifying the operating system. This is a safety feature so that you can turn of the computer even if the operating system’s “Shut down” command isn’t working.

After eight seconds of the power button being held down, the Windows kernel realizes that the user is trying to do a force-power-off of the system, and it quickly takes a kernel dump that can be uploaded to the Windows Error Reporting service the next time you turn the system on. […]

These emergency kernel dumps are internally classified as “long power button hold” (LPBH) failures. One of the pieces of information recorded in these emergency kernel dumps is whether the screen consists entirely of black pixels. Those failures are sub-classified as “black screen LPBH”, and they go to a special virtual team for analysis. (I happen to be a member of this black screen LPBH team.)

Sometimes the problem is a broken video driver. Sometimes the video driver is doing just fine, but the desktop compositor is just handing black pixels to the video driver. Sometimes the desktop compositor is doing just fine, but nobody is drawing anything to the screen. And those cases are further subdivided further into cases like “there is nobody around to draw anything” or “the person who normally draws stuff is hung.”

But this time around, this was all… working as intended:

After some questioning, the customer support engineer put the story together: It turned out that this customer really liked the color black, so they decided to set up a goth theme. They set the wallpaper color to black. They set the title bar color to black. They set the button color to black. They set the window background color to black. They set the window text color to black. Every possible color you could pick in the Colors control panel was set to black.

Once you get yourself into this situation, it’s hard to get out because you can’t see anything.

I tried to do this myself in an online emulator, and got pretty far. You can’t really turn everything black, but I can see a setup where it feels that way: