Black Screen of Death

[prob.: related to the Floating Head of Death in a famous Far Side cartoon.] A failure mode of {Microsloth Windows}. On an attempt to launch a DOS box, a networked Windows system not uncommonly blanks the screen and locks up the PC so hard that it requires a cold {boot} to recover. This unhappy phenomenon is known as The Black Screen of Death. See also {Blue Screen of Death}, which has become rather more common.

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