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Bill Gates has said Donald Trump's decision to stop US funding of the World Health Organisation "during a world health crisis" is as "dangerous as it sounds". The Microsoft founder tweeted:"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever."

This season's colours are blue, white and bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Chicago! A town famed for what some might regard as a jumped-up quiche masquerading as pizza and home of the first skyscraper. Could there be a better venue for today's bork?We like Chicago, although we're less keen on the landing approach to the city's O'Hare airport, which left this hack feeling a tad poorly on one occasion as Boeing's finest tumbled through the turbulence.Also unwell, and snapped by a Register reader, is this example of digital signage, caught borking in the window of LOFT, a women's clothing emporium. Sadly, a jaunt...

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...

The wrong kind of intrusion protection Symantec has acknowledged an issue with an update to its Endpoint Protection Client that causes a Windows kernel exception after users this morning came down with a mild case of Blue Screen of Death.A Reg reader who got in touch about the problem confirmed "multiple" businesses running Symantec were getting hit with the BSOD stick.According to the support note TECH256643: When run LiveUpdate, Endpoint Protection Client gets a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) indicates IDSvix86.sys/IDSvia64.sys is the cause of the exception BAD_POOL_CALLER (c2) or KERNEL_MODE_HEAP_CORRUPTION (13A). When BSOD happens, Intrusion Prevention signature version is...

...Lundgren will serve a 15-month prison sentence and will be forced to pay a $50,000 fine. Lundgren had taken to downloading free software that Microsoft offers to Windows users commonly called restore disks... Many states are actively pushing for legislation that guarantees consumers the right to repair their own gadgets, California has legislation in process to force device makers to provide users and third parties with items needed to repair devices...

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...

Bill Gates is sorry that he made it so annoying to log in to your computer. The billionaire Microsoft co-founder admitted Wednesday that the Control-Alt-Delete function originally used to get into Windows computers is an awkward maneuver. “If I could make one small edit, I’d make that a single key,” Gates said Wednesday on a panel at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York City. It’s a confession Gates has made before. In 2013, he blamed IBM for the issue. “We could have had a single button. But the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to...

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...

A Dog's Purpose is a real movie, but the website is infected. The trailer is on YouTube, just do not go to the website.

Plugging a Kindle Paperwhite into a PC running Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update installed sparks a full system meltdown, it is claimed. Connecting the Amazon e-reader to a fully up-to-date W10 machine via USB triggers an immediate Blue Screen of Death, according to complaints on Microsoft's support forum. All the trouble started when people downloaded and installed the Anniversary Update, which arrived at the turn of the month. That's the same upgrade that has knackered millions of webcams and caused some systems to freeze up. The crash kicks off in the storage partition driver partmgr.sys, with a bugcheck code...

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).

Microsoft has added a QR code to its infamous Blue Screen of Death in Windows 10. As of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 14316, when the operating system falls over, you get not only the sad ASCII smiley but also a QR square that contains an encoded URL that leads you to a webpage about your problem. Scan it with a smartphone or other handheld and your browser will be taken to the embedded web addresses. Right now, it just points to windows.com/stopcode, which explains typical Blue-Screen-of-Death causes, but in future it could contain detailed information about the crash –...

The March roll-up update for Windows 10 appears to be causing headaches for users, some of whom have been left with computers that don't boot up after the patch has been applied. Microsoft issued the update on March 2 Australian time and users who installed it via Windows Update soon after started complaining of problems. Some experienced extremely long start-up times, with their devices taking over an hour to reach the user account login prompt. Others said they were forced to boot from USB thumb drives with an earlier installation version of Windows 10 and attempt startup repair. Also reported...

a South San Francisco resident received a phone call from a man fraudulently posing as a Microsoft Windows employee and asking for personal information on Wednesday, according to police. The suspect, calling himself Mike Johnson, told the resident that her computer had been compromised by a hacker and that he needed access to her computer to conduct a diagnosis. The victim did not provide any personal information to the suspect, according to police. Microsoft said that they do not contact their customers over the phone, nor do they have any records of anyone from the company calling the victim. The...

Calling the latest operating system a “failure” and Microsoft’s leaders “idiots,” a top tech website has proclaimed the PC era over. Windows is coming to a dead end, they say. PC shipments collapsed in the last quarter by almost 14 percent, analysts with IDC said last week, marking the biggest drop in sales since the firm started tracking them 19 years ago. The problem, said ZDNet’s well respected Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, isn’t the designs from the likes of HP and Dell or the size of consumer’s wallets. It’s Microsoft. “Look at the numbers: Metro-interface operating systems have already failed,” Vaughn-Nichols...

Windows 95 was arguably make or break for Microsoft, and today we celebrate the date in which it was released seventeen years ago. The iconic clouds startup screen. Seventeen years ago today Windows 95 was released to the public to major fanfare and success, this success also brought an antitrust case against Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer 4.0 with a later service release of Windows 95. Windows 95 integrated Microsoft's formerly separate MS-DOS and Windows products. It featured significant improvements over its predecessor, Windows 3.1, most notably in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in its relatively simplified "plug-n-play" features. There were also major changes...

We have two desktops in our household. Just a couple of weeks ago, my wife's WinXP desktop, at that time just under 3 years old (not on warranty), started going blue screen every day at least once, always when she was using it, but you could always reboot it. I took a pic of the BSOD and emailed it to a computer service guy friend, and he said that machine was on the way out, and not worth repairing. We turned off the machine, bought a new computer, then I transferred my wife's data to the new machine. I wanted...

I need some help with a BSOD on my laptop. This happens kind of frequently (about once or twice a week) and it's always the same thing: STOP:0x0000007F (0x0000000000000008, 0x0000000080050031, 0x00000000000406F8, 0xFFFFF80002C4BEC0) I've reimaged the computer (it's a Sony Vaio, Model VGN-NW235F 64-bit running Windows 7), checked updates, flashed the BIOS, reinstalled hardware, all of that has done no good. I'd really appreciate it if anyone has any ideas on this, thank you!

7 anti-Apple cliches that need to dieby Chris Rawson (RSS feed) on May 29th 2010 at 8:30PMPC vs. Mac flamewars are older than the web itself, but it seems like the more popular/successful Apple gets, the more heated the argument gets on both sides. Almost any debate about the relative merits of one platform or another is guaranteed to degenerate into an all-out shouting match. In the midst of all the fighting and name calling, the oddest thing happens: almost every time, you'll see a lot of the same points being raised by both sides again and again. Some of...

The presence of a hard-to-detect rootkit may have caused Windows XP machines to freeze up after applying a patch from Microsoft last week, according to preliminary analysis of the problem from Microsoft's security team. Microsoft's users forums filled up with reports of Windows XP users experiencing the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) after applying the 13 patches released by Redmond last week. The problem was later linked to one specific update - MS10-015 - a patch for an "important" kernel flaw - and it was discovered that uninstalling this package unfroze affected machines. The Blue Screen problem affected a...