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Comment by Minor49er | Hacker News Reader

That's a bit extreme. You should at least allow some error messages. Though those ones should just say "Oops, something went wrong :)"

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Seriously speaking, it took me many years to realize that nearly all Windows BSoD messages are non-specific and useless - looking them up is a total waste of time. The only correct way to identify the actual error is analyzing the crashdump in WinDbg.

I recently fixed a family computer that crashes randomly after a RAM upgrade. Removing the RAM didn't help, and it was totally a wild goose chase. The BSoD stop codes indicate some types of crucial system errors or memory corruption, sometimes in drivers, sometimes in kernel, but nonspecific. Finally I installed WinDbg and opened the crash dumps, and all dumps have the same error, and it became obvious immediately,

    KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR - This bug check indicates that the requested page of kernel data from the paging file could not be read into memory.

RAM was fine, the kernel simply cannot swap from the bad hard drive, no wonder it crashes. But the SSD was known-good, so I checked voltages, and saw the +5 V had a huge voltage drop. Upon closer look, found a loose wire at the power supply.

That's quite the debugging! I can see how you acquired your username.

I can imagine that BSODs are useful-enough if you're writing a Windows kernel driver (or doing internal QA for someone writing a driver), and your new driver is what crashes.

(Which would be pretty likely, since when qualifying a new driver, you'd be stupid to use anything but the most bog-standard hardware and drivers for everything other than the particular device-under-test.)

In this particular example, I think the error is as specific as it gets, though.

Please reread the comment. The quoted error is from the debugger, not from the stop code in a BSoD screen. The BSoD screen would be something like...

    0x0000000A: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

or...

    0x0000007E: SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

It corresponds to whatever the last operation kernel was executing before it fails, but without information on how it fails, and only indicates that something is wrong in the kernel or in a driver in general. You can chase these stop codes and check for bad RAM or bad drivers forever without real progress. Don't spend too much time on these codes, it's a waste of time. Enable memdump and get WinDbg. In comparison, analyzing the crash dump in WinDbg gives real information.

    KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR - This bug check indicates that the requested page of kernel data from the paging file could not be read into memory.

Or perhaps the famous ? from ed :)

I like the error messages in some early BASIC interpreters. They must be as short as possible, since the entire interpreter fits in 4 KiB of RAM. For example, in Li-Chen Wang's Palo Alto Tiny BASIC...

The only message for all syntax errors, is:

    WHAT?

The only message for all runtime errors, is:

    HOW?

And the only message for legal but unsupported operations (e.g. out of memory) is:

    SORRY

See the source code here: https://github.com/ancientcomputing/8080_8085/blob/master/Ti...

From the Z80ASM users manual (1984):

Syntax Error

This message appears when the assembler is too confused to know what went wrong.

Ohhh the horror...

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