14 DAY TRIAL // With Windows closing in to an install base of 1 billion by mid 2008, according to estimates presented by Microsoft, the operating system has come to represent nothing more than a mundane presence. But at the same time, the ubiquity of the Windows client is also making no less generalized the problems associated with the platform. The stability and reliability of Windows have always represented two problematic areas, with the Blue Screen of Death becoming a circadian source of frustration and irony.
Vista comes to improve on what XP had to offer in terms of stability and reliability, but the latest operating system to come out of Redmond is not without faults of its own. You have already been able to read about a Vista caveat that allows any user to virtually kill the operating system with the minimal possible amount of effort. It involves the misusing of a combination of just two keys.
Pressing down the Windows key together with E is one of the most popular Windows shortcuts, designed to open My Computer, or just Computer, since we are dealing with Vista, and semantics can make a world of difference. Keeping the two keys pressed for a longer period of time - somewhere between 10 seconds and half a minute - will send Vista in a continuous loop of attempting to open what only seems to be an endless number of Computer instances.
As you can see from the video embedded at the bottom of this article, Vista becomes unresponsive to the point where, in order to regain the functionality of the operating system, a manual restart is in order. Still, it is important to note that some users have not experienced this problem, and only ended up with a consistent volume of opened Computer windows but nothing more. Still, for others - and the video is a testimony to this scenario - while Vista does not crash, it is little good for anything else, as even Task Manager is inaccessible. "This Vista problem has been reported on the internet, but this is my attempt to actually verify if Windows Vista can be crashed in under 10 seconds," revealed videobull, the maker of the video.