Stephen Groom Taking a shot at becoming a Poker Pro

Windows XP Crash on demand

I know I'm about 6 years behind with this, but when I stumbled across it on another one of my frequent 2am internet journeys I was quite amused.

From http://www.tweakxp.com/article37502.aspx

 

Windows-XP has a "feature" (???) with which it is possible to manually crash a system by simply holding the right CTRL key and pressing the "Scroll Lock" key twice. This feature can be turned on by the following steps:

1. Start regedit. (If you are unfamiliar with regedit, please refer to this FAQ)
2. Navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters
3. Create a new DWORD value and name it CrashOnCtrlScroll
4. Right-click on this newly created value and click on Modify
5. Enter 1 in the Value data field and click on OK.
6. Close regedit and reboot your system.
7. Now you can blue screen (crash) your system by holding the right CTRL key and pressing "Scroll Lock" twice.

Note:

Your system may reboot or show a blue screen whenever this crash is initiated. If your system reboots after initiating the crash, and you want to see the blue screen, follow these steps:

1. Go to Control Panel > System
2. Click on the Advanced tab
3. Under Startup and Recovery, click the Settings button.
4. Under System failure, uncheck the option Automatically restart.

Happy crashing...

 

 

Now, the first thing I wondered was WHY.  What possible reason could the devs have for this weird little keystroke.  And then I set out to test it.  I then realised that I was booted into MacOS.  I wasn't going to reboot into that ungodly OS just to purposely crash it (it usually would anyway) so I've just put it up here, incase anyone is bored enough to try it on their (or a friend's pc)

Stephen