Crossrail? More like Borkrail...
- Reference: 1769499008
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/01/27/crossrail_more_like_borkrail/
- Source link:
Sent in by an eagle-eyed Register reader, today's entry in the pantheon of bork was snapped at London's Paddington station, where a passenger can enjoy the delights of the UK's national rail network, as well as take a trip on a variety of London underground lines (aka the "Tube") including the District, Metropolitan, and the increasingly inaccurately named Circle.
And no, the Elizabeth Line is in town, taking visitors from East to West and back again on trains with astonishingly uncomfortable seats and a bladder-bursting lack of toilet facilities.
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And, it appears, some very unhappy information screens.
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By our reckoning, that looks like a recent Windows 10 blue-screen-of-death, where Microsoft has attempted to hide what has befallen the device in question behind a sad emoticon and the friendly text "Your PC ran into a problem."
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Elizabeth line information screen BSOD - Click to enlarge
Something running into something else is never a thing a passenger wants to see on public transport, and we suspect that something has gone badly wrong behind the scenes. The stop code IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL usually happens when a process stomps over memory to which it should have access. Windows responds to such antics in time-honored fashion… by halting abruptly with a stop error.
However, look a little closer, and it seems there might be something more to this error. Aside from the fact that the user is being directed to http://windows.com/stopcode rather than something starting with https , several characters have been replaced with blocks, suggesting that a video driver or some video hardware is playing up.
Our reader, a former Vulture, didn't hang around to find out what happened if and when that percentage counter reached 100. After all, it takes a very special kind of nerd to hang around a station watching borked information signs.
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However, we were saddened to see that for London's Elizabeth Line at least, that that cockroach of public transport, Windows 2000, appears to have been squashed once and for all. Had it endured a little longer, we're sure that the old thing would have kept on running or spared customers a cutesy emoticon where a hard-core technical error really belongs. ®
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Cockroach?
Win2K is by far the best OS that redmond ever released. It has all been downhill since then.
In fact, it is one of only two ms products that I still find useful ... the other is the original dove bar mouse, of which I own around 100.
I use Win2K only to run ACAD2K, with a little help from Cygwin ... air-gapped, of course.
Downhill started there already
I agree with "best OS from Redmond" except for one aspect of "downhill" that already began there – the UI abomination of the "Microsoft Management Console" which started the long sequence of only ever increasing UI clutter.
IME IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL was quite common in the XP era with poorly written drivers. I guess WHQL largely removed that problem, and since about W7 it has been a sign of physically failing HW. So monitor the evtlogs in your fleet.
Those were the days
Solaris wouldn’t have put up with this rubbish. I recall running some CAD application which was having a memory leak. As soon as the app went outside what the OS allowed, it shut the app down like flicking a finger at it. And Solaris continued like nothing had happened.
Who says Microsoft doesn't innovate?
Give them credit for designing a BSOD screen such that the frowny emoticon :( has its meaning clear whether in landscape or this portrait orientation!