Computer Repair Tech

I am always amazed when I see some business using some flavor of Windows operating system and displaying a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) on a publicly viewed production system! I mean, it's one thing to have a user's PC crash and complain with the unrecoverable error display, but to have a system that is serving customers and have it viewed by customers, it's rather disconcerting and doesn't fill customers with a strong sense of ease. I see this all the time in stores at check-out stands for Point-of-Sale (POS) cash registers, most recently at a Mervyn's department store during the Christmas shopping season. "Hello, IT department? We can't get the cash register to come online and we have customers waiting!" This certainly doesn't fill one with a real sense of confidence in the financial transaction processing ability of the business.

Here are a couple of examples of what I'm talking about, but on a much larger scale and more obvious that something is seriously wrong with the business' IT infrastructure. How'd you like to be walking down the famous Las Vegas Strip, look up and see the Paris Hotel's marquee severely hosed up one night and then see the marquee the next morning with Windows Explorer showing different files instead of the hotel's advertising content? How is this possible? Who hired the idiots who decided to trust a Windows OS for their publicly-viewable display systems?

That's pretty bad, but I'm sure the system crash and resulting displayed error were fixed pretty quickly, at least taken off-line. The folks at Toronto's big department store, The Bay, left their BSOD display up over the course of a couple of days! As a source of pride? They liked the pretty shade of blue Microsoft chose for the BSOD? I'm thinking that the IT folks in charge didn't have their jobs much longer after that display gaff. Not so much of a resume builder, I would think.

It is quite possible that these images have been put together by some creative Photoshop user for these Gizmodo.com stories, but we know these happen. The most famous BSOD is with Bill Gates having Windows 98 introduced at Comdex a few years back. (Video located on YouTube.) Gotta love the quality of programming coming out of Microsoft!

If they had only chosen a Linux-based system to run their systems! They would have saved money on the licensing fees and had a stable and secure system that is required in any production environment. The IT department must have had consultants who sold them the Microsoft junk, "Here ya go! This fine Microsoft solution will suit your needs just fine."