Story by
Emil Protalinski
Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, incl Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, including Ars Technica, Neowin, TechSpot, ZDNet, and CNET. Stay in touch via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
I have always found BSOD errors on large screens to be amusing, but there was never any WTF factor for me as I had experienced many and knew they are fairly easy to figure out. This is different.
Late on Friday I spotted a tweet from F-Secure CRO Mikko Hypponen that I found absolutely hilarious. He had posted it in the morning, and it essentially it showed a Windows Phone with a standard error message.
Here’s the line that caught his eye: “Insert your Windows installation disc and restart your computer.” Really, and where exactly would one do that?
Check it out for yourself:
My colleagues immediately suggested that it was probably fake. I looked at it again, and quickly agreed, thinking that I was quite a fool to think otherwise.
Yet later that day, WMPoweruser dug into the story and found that a user by the name of dantist over on the Pocket PC forums had experienced the same problem with his Lumia 920 on Monday:
Coincidence? I think not!
A bit more searching on Twitter and it turns out dantist, or rather Johnny Ruokokoski, had tweeted the above image on Wednesday. After a push from another user, the Windows Phone Support account go involved, helping solve the mystery:
@winphonesupport don’t worry, regular customer will never see this message, I think it’s hardcoded smth in the kernel
— Johnny Ruokokoski (@rkkski) January 11, 2013
@rkkski Understood, if this is happening when you are flashing your phone, we are unable to provide support for it. ^EB
— WindowsPhoneSupport (@WinPhoneSupport) January 11, 2013
@winphonesupport and I didn’t expect any support. but thanks for fast feedback, it shows how good WP support is, I like it :)
— Johnny Ruokokoski (@rkkski) January 11, 2013
So there you have it. If you’re messing around with your Windows Phone device, you might get this amusing error. As WMPoweruser put it, this is a pretty good “to prove that Windows Phone 8 runs on the NT Kernel,” in case you were having doubts.
See also – Top 5 Windows Error Messages and Their Solutions
Image credit: Mark Seymour
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