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Windows struck down at Asda Click & Collect 'Drive Thru' For the latest in The Register's sporadic series of Windows falling over in strange places, we present UK retailer Asda and its borked Click and Collect "Drive Thru" terminal.Snapped by friend of El Reg and bearded rust-botherer Andy Hinks during a misguided attempted to collect six months' worth of groceries, the glorious Blue Screen of Death was beaming its cold light over visitors to the Walmart tentacle's Hollingbury branch in the damp city of Brighton.Because Blade Runner day has now been and gone, and we still can't bark "Enhance" at...

RIP: The Edge is dead... as in the EdgeHTML layout code Microsoft on Thursday said it intends to use the open-source Chromium browser engine in the desktop version of its Edge browser, promising the two per cent of global internet users who favor Edge an improved web experience.Joe Belfiore, corporate veep of Windows, announced the plan, which was reported earlier this week. "Ultimately, we want to make the web experience better for many different audiences," he said. One of those audiences may be macOS users, who despite not clamoring for Edge should have access to Microsoft's browser at some point:...

Got a Surface Book 2 on 1803? You should probably uninstall last week's update Users of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, rejoice! Microsoft has slung out a hefty patch to, er, fix a whole bunch of stuff that was broken in the Update of the Damned.Released last night, KB4469342 is packed full of updates, with two notable changes lurking at the end of the list of tweaks. The failure of mapped drives to reconnect after starting and logging into a Windows device – which was a showstopper for many enterprises and consumers with home servers – has been fixed,...

Relive that sphincter-loosening Blue Screen of Death Video Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that 20 years have passed since Windows 98 memorably fell over during Bill Gates' presentation at Comdex.A nervous-looking Chris Capossela, now chief marketing officer at Microsoft, attempted to plug a scanner into a Windows 98 PC while Gates looked on. The intent was to demonstrate the plug-and-play abilities of the upcoming OS. The result was an all-too-familiar Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), and a "whoah..." from Capossela.Youtube Video"That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet," quipped Gates.As Windows 10...

Turn your PC into a green-eyed monster Redmond has released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002 – one of the biggest updates to its cloudy operating system – ahead of the release of the Creators Update later this year. There's a whole host of upgrades and additions in the new build, but one that will be immediately noticeable to developers is the axing of the traditional Blue Screen of Death whenever the operating system throws its toys out of the playpen. Now it will be green. "In an effort to more easily distinguish Windows Insider reports vs the reports of...

Windows crashing and producing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is seldom pleasant, or convenient. It's also seldom as conspicuously displayed as in the image below, which The Register found on Facebook late last week. By your correspondent's reckoning, that there is a five-storey BSOD. If you can't see the pic below, click here (it is planted in Facebook's garden, so if you'd prefer not to visit, you were warned).

It’s time to slap his name on another of his crowning achievements: Obamaware. It’s the piece of garbage combination of software, hardware, website, and online application process that goes with Obamacare. The outrageously expensive miserable failure of an information technology project is now called Obamaware. The five million lines of sloppy and shoddy computer programming are called Obamaware. The half-billion dollar software project that was illegally contracted out to incompetent programmers and never even tested is now called Obamaware. The overpriced bloated website healthcare.gov – that gives people the dreaded ‘404’ and no one can even log into – is...

FAA computer systems reported down across East Coast... Developing...

I need help on installing a Windows XP upgrade to a Windows ME machine. The computer is a Micron Systems IBM-compatible machine with 640.0 mb RAM and a 667 MHz CPU clock. I'm getting the following error after the Windows XP setup restarts the computer: A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps: Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly-installed hard drives or hard drive controllers....

Excerpt - PITTSBURG, Calif. - A senior editor for PC World Magazine was shot to death in his home in what police described as a drug-related attack, authorities said Wednesday. Rex Farrance, 59, the San Francisco-based magazine's senior technical editor, was shot in the chest after four masked men broke into his home in a suburb east of the city around 9 p.m. Tuesday, Pittsburg police said. The assailants also pistol-whipped Farrance's wife, Lenore Vantosh-Farrance, 56, a registered nurse. She called 911, but the attackers fled before officers arrived. "We have substantial reason to believe that the victim and his...

The software giant thinks it can make robotic engineering easier with a set of standards: its own of course Microsoft believes the demand for consumer, research, and military robots will grow significantly--and it wants to own the market. At the annual RoboBusiness conference this past June, the software giant released the first "community technical preview" of Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS). Now, in its second preview version, MSRS is both a product and the lynchpin of a new educational push: the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE). Founded by Microsoft Research, Georgia Tech, and Bryn Mawr College, the computer science...

I need help. Windows XP SP2 on my computer will not start. Earlier this morning, everything was going great, then Firefox locked up while doing a Google search. Locked up tight, and I had to press and hold the power button for several seconds to shut down. Now, when I power up, everything goes well through POST until Windows tries to start up, then the screen goes black and all disk activity ceases. After waiting several minutes with nothing happening, pressing the power button for a fraction of a second shuts the computer down. I've tried booting to Last Known...

IBM today announced free software and educational resources to help developers in Russia build and deploy innovative applications based on open standards and open source. Tapping into the booming software development market in Russia, IBM is giving software developers, architects and students free access to software and hundreds of new tools and technical and educational resources that will enable them to more easily build open standards-based applications. With a few clicks of a mouse, developers can download free versions of IBM middleware, IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition and IBM DB2 Universal Database Express-C, as well as access trial code,...

Excerpts - 7:30PM: I'm back home, time to get a bite to eat, then I'm going to write up today's Microsoft event, or maybe do a podcast. But first I wanted to say, they're getting away with murder on Memeorandum. Part of the reason may be that the net went down halfway through the presentation, just as they were getting to the demo, which was a total wipeout, biggest failure I've seen in almost 30 years in the biz. I think there's a pretty good chance they cut off our net access so we couldn't write about it real-time, if...

Not since Walter Mondale suggested that he might raise taxes have I had such a terrible, sick, sinking sensation deep in the pit of my stomach. Things like the Michael Jackson verdict, using Christina Aguilera’s music to torture prisoners at Gitmo and the rising cost of gasoline are inconsequential compared to Apple Computers’ abrupt surrender to Intel. This is serious business. To put things into perspective, my devotion to the Macintosh is of an intensity similar to Paul Greenberg’s feelings for "the South." This has been going on since 1987. I think my first Mac was called an SE, and...

Many argue that communism will never be possible because of "human nature". The essence of this false argument is the belief that a communist society would consist of an all-powerful central government that would tell everybody what to do--and would therefore undermine the creative initiative of individuals and the search for happiness. • This argument is based on two false assumptions: (1) It assumes that a communist society will look like the former Soviet Union, or the current China, North Korea, etc (ie: corrupt police states with a feudal-style ruling class) (2) It assumes that people will only work in...

Nearly a decade ago, just a few months after Microsoft shipped Windows 95, I asked Bill Gates if it was a conscious decision in the development of that product to give Windows more of a Mac look and feel. Of course I knew he'd say it wasn't, but I couldn't resist asking. "There was no goal even to compete with Macintosh," Gates proclaimed. "We don't even think of Macintosh as a competitor." That was a crock, so I pressed the issue a little. I asked him how he accounted for the widespread perception that Windows 95 looked a lot like...

Despite suffering technical glitches that prompted jokes and guffaws, Bill Gates promised Wednesday that Microsoft Corp. would help millions of consumers stay seamlessly plugged into a world of digital music, movies, video games and television shows. In his seventh annual keynote speech at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft's chairman explained that the proliferation of broadband Internet access and the falling price of data storage are compelling people to put music, photos, movies and other aspects of their life into a digital format. "We predicted at the beginning of this decade that this would be a decade where the...

Windows XP Service Pack 2: Install With Care By Frank J. Ohlhorst and Vincent A. Randazzese, CRN 9:00 AM EDT Fri. Jul. 23, 2004 The real surprise with Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 isn't potential compatibility issues, but the mayhem that can occur when SP2 is downloaded onto a system. CRN Test Center engineers evaluated a release candidate two (RC2) version of SP2, and upon completion of the install on three out of five systems, the machines blue-screened. A message stated that "winserv" was missing. The blue screen occurred on both Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel platforms,...

Inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Delete Combo Is Retiring From IBM The Associated Press RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. (AP) - The man who spent five minutes writing the computer code that would bail out the world's PC users for decades is retiring Friday. David Bradley programmed one of the most well-known key combinations around: Ctrl-Alt-Delete. It forces obstinate computers to restart when they no longer follow other commands. Bradley, 55, is leaving IBM Corp. after 28 1/2 years. By 1980, Bradley was one of 12 people working to create the IBM PC. The engineers knew they had to design a simple way to...