Black on black: how a goth fan "broke" Windows 3.1

Raymond Chen, a Windows veteran and author of the blog The Old New Thing, devoted a recent post to the "black screen." Modern Windows has a whole diagnostic mechanism for such cases. But the most memorable story on the subject dates back to the Windows 3.1 era.

Twelve seconds on the power button

If you hold a PC's power button for 12 seconds, the machine shuts off at the hardware level without notifying the operating system. This safeguard exists for when the regular "Shut down" command doesn't work.

Windows, however, manages to react sooner. After eight seconds of holding, the kernel realizes the user is about to force a power-off and hurriedly takes a kernel dump. On the next boot, the dump can be sent to Windows Error Reporting. The remaining four seconds are sometimes not enough, and the dump comes out incomplete. Chen believes that Windows Insider builds ask the user to let go of the button so the system can collect its data calmly and only then turn off.

Inside Microsoft, such failures are called LPBH, short for long power button hold. Among other things, the dump records whether the screen consists entirely of black pixels. Those cases are labeled "black screen LPBH" and go to a dedicated virtual team, which includes Chen himself.

The causes vary. Sometimes the video driver is broken. Sometimes the driver is fine, but the desktop compositor is handing it black pixels. And sometimes the compositor works too, yet nothing is drawing to the screen: either nobody is there to draw, or whoever normally does it has hung.

The goth theme

In the Windows 3.1 days, a customer called support. The computer turns on, Windows starts, but once the logo disappears there is nothing on the screen. After some questioning, the engineer pieced the story together. The customer really loved the color black and decided to give the system a goth look. The wallpaper, title bars, buttons, window background and window text all became black: in short, every color the Colors control panel allowed you to set.

Getting out of that situation is hard, since you can't see anything. Chen doesn't know exactly how the engineer fixed it. He guesses they booted into MS-DOS, opened win.ini in EDIT.COM and deleted the [colors] section, restoring the system colors to their defaults.

The blog's readers were skeptical. In Windows 3.1 you couldn't recolor things such as the white mouse cursor or icons, so the screen was unlikely to be entirely black. Another commenter, who spent many years supporting users, countered that what they say can't be taken literally. To a user, a black screen with a couple of icons easily counts as "completely black."

Source: Lobsters