Amusing Computer Errors

Introduction

I was once told that computers never make mistakes—rather it’s the people who program them. Whether or not you agree with this statement, I’m sure there have been times when your computer has done something you weren’t expecting it to! It will usually pop up an error message, explaining what went wrong, and perhaps tell you how to avoid it happening again in the future.

Occasionally, things go seriously wrong, and you see a rather cryptic “Stop Error” (Windows NT) or one of those aptly titled “Blue Screens Of Death” (Windows 3.x and 9x). These are usually very rare, and shouldn’t bother us much unless we have serious problems.

This page doesn’t deal with either of these though, and it isn’t going to be able to help you decrypt your Stop Error codes. It does however, contain screen dumps of the most stupid, and in some cases most hilarious error messages ever! It also contains screen dumps of other computer happenings, which make you think to yourself “Hold on, this just isn’t right!”.

Infeasibly Large File

[1 object selected—3.98 GB]

This file on Windows 95 is reported as being almost 4 GB in size! The file was actually less than 10 MB, and besides, the hard disk is only 500 MB!

Large Disk

[Size on disk: 126 TB]

I’m sure I don’t even have to explain why this one is wrong! The maximum possible size is 16 TB, and this reckons my 10 GB partition is 126 TB! That’s over one hundred and twenty nine thousand gigabytes! Now that would be handy…

Large Windows 98

[Picture of Windows 98 in 320×240 resolution]

Here Windows 98 is, for some reason, running in very low resolution (320×240). The result being that the start menu takes up the whole screen!

The

[Google search of the]

At the time I took this screen dump, Google had about 3 800 000 000 pages in its cache, yet a search for “the” brought back over 5 700 000 000 pages! Google has even more results than it does pages for the word “the”.

Long Time Copying

[458864 Minutes Remaining]

A gross over‑calculation of the time taken to copy some files in Windows 98. If the time is correct, it would be equal to about ten months of copying! (fortunately it only took about five minutes)

BBC JavaScript Alert

[We would have popped this person, but they fell outside of our percentage (2%)]

I received this JavaScript alert whilst visiting the BBC web site. I’m not entirely sure what it is meant to mean though!

Not Enough Colours

[You have a 1 color display, Lemmings requires a 256 color display]

This error comes up when I play Lemmings on Windows 98. Clearly, my display does have more than one colour… In fact it has quite a few million colours!

Successful Error

[Error scanning folders on IMAP server… Success]

Since when has an error been a success?

Umm… What??

[ÇëʹÓõÁ°æÈí¼þ,Press OK!!]

This is from Bromley College’s copy of Microsoft Word, running on Windows NT 4.0. The spurious document in question, was “AS Media: Audience Task Sheet One”, by Ray Whitney. He was casually working away on his AS Level Media Studies work, when he was smacked in the face by this rather stupid error message!

I Repeat—What??

[MõMä(I!ÇIƦII—OK]

Here I was testing my email server, to make sure it wasn’t open to abuse by spammers. I restarted the email server while I was still connected, and I got this similarly meaningless message! I think it’s actually meant to say something along the lines of “Connection Closed By Remote Host”. It clearly doesn’t though…

Submit Your Error Messages

If you experience any amusing computer errors, please feel free to screen dump them and send them to me. If possible, please save them as a PNG or a zipped BMP file. You can get in touch via my “Contact” page, and I’ll let you know where to send the image.

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