13 of the best error messages

[v85rawdeal]

Which of them is your favourite?

(and I may be getting ahead of myself, but I think I can see a foregone conclusion)

[Tiago]

Guru Meditation (Commodore Amiga) !!!! favorite !!!
The only that i can smile....

the one i hate the most... all over the years: The Blue Screen of Death ....

[Demon Cleaner]

Well I hated the Guru Meditation quite a lot, did make me punch my Amiga sometimes.

The poll shouldn't be titled, "your favorite", but "you hate most".

[Harrison]

Favourite is objective. It could be the most amusing to you, as in the most cryptic and meaningless... such as "An error has been encountered and the system needs to shut down" giving no reasons or indication of why. Macs still like to do that type of cryptic message. Or equally the most annoying, or the most useful. At least the Guru messages did give codes that hinted at the issues, as well as the colour of the error screen. And even Windows BSOD often indicated what had caused the error and some memory address codes to help start searching for solutions, so not all bad.

You missed the most classic error of them all. "No keyboard detected, press any key to continue."

Even today we still don't have a proper logical error catching system which is quite mad. Windows is much better because if it crashes you can look in the system logs and normally find the ! errors logged with quite well described reasons for the issues, but it still isn't that user friendly for anyone not too clued up on computers.

[Stephen Coates]

I posted a reply to this topic last night. Where did it go?

[Teho]

The one I still think of as the most annoying would be LOAD ERROR on the C64. I was always stuck with a tape deck for it back then, and remember watching that counter tick away slowly for several minutes while dreading that error. It would come up often as well, and in a stroke of sadism it wouldn't stop loading and tell you if it occurred say, halfway through. Oh no, it would always complete the loading cycle regardless and only let you know if it was successful or not when it was done. Which kept happening more and more as the tapes got worn. Rage-inducing to say the least.

I want to call Red Ring of Death my favourite, as I don't own a 360 myself.

But really, it has to be the Guru. I'm not just being patriotic here, I mean when you got that error as if to say "Something went wrong, the Guru has to meditate on it.", how beautifully random is that? I know the story behind it now of course, but back then it was just so stupidly far out that you couldn't help but love it. And then Commodore had them change it to the boring Software Failure from OS 2.0 and onwards because they just didn't get it. Which was Commodore in a nutshell I suppose.