Commentary

Alexander Wolfe
 

How To Crash Windows Vista In 10 Seconds Or Less

Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is a mighty paradox. On the one hand, it's more robust and feature-rich than any of its predecessors. For the most part, it's also more secure and is immune to many pretty sophisticated takedown attempts. But it's got one nasty Achilles' Heel, which'll enable you to crash the OS in under 10 seconds.

Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is a mighty paradox. On the one hand, it's more robust and feature-rich than any of its predecessors. For the most part, it's also more secure and is immune to many pretty sophisticated takedown attempts. But it's got one nasty Achilles' Heel, which'll enable you to crash the OS in under 10 seconds.Here's the deal: One of the simplest command sequences you can think of will take Vista down completely. Hold down the Windows key and the letter "E" for 10 seconds or so. After opening up Windows Explorer windows ad infinitum, your system will stop responding.

Like this:


More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>



Holding down the Windows key and the letter "E" will send Vista into its death throes. (click to enlarge image)

How should you protect yourself? Check out my article, "What To Do When Windows Vista Crashes: Little-Known Recovery Strategies." I describe the Complete PC Backup utility, which enables you to save a bit-for-bit copy of your hard drive. That'll allow you to restore your system without having to go through a cumbersome, full reinstall of the OS.

Equally useful (maybe more useful) is little-known process to repair bad boot sectors. Called Bootrec, it's an update of something that was previously available on XP. That portion of the article is located here.

If you have any unique crashes you've encountered, or tips you'd like to share, please email me or leave a (clean) comment below.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links