Goth aesthetic gone wild: a user's self-inflicted black screen of non-death in Windows 3.1’s
Labeled in black on black - controls for a galactic hyper-hearse or ill-advised Windows theme?
Microsoft senior software engineer Raymond Chen explained what happens when you hold down the power button on a Windows PC. In an amusing story, he shared a time when a customer accidentally created a "Goth Mode" for Windows 3.1. According to Chen, after Windows 3.1 booted up, the user was greeted with a black screen, as they had set every possible color in the system to black.
The customer had customized the wallpaper, title bar, button, window background, and text colors to black, essentially creating their own Goth theme. Chen suspects the mouse pointer might have remained visible, but the user would have struggled to see anything on the screen. The anecdote serves as a reminder of how difficult it can be to recover from such a situation.
To resolve the issue, Chen suggested deleting the [colors] section from the win.ini file. He explained that after eight seconds of holding the power button, the Windows kernel attempts to take a kernel dump for diagnostics. This process is classified as an "long power button hold" (LPBH) failure, with one of the captured bits of information indicating if all the pixels on the screen are black.
Today's Windows struggles with dark mode, but in the past, a completely black screen could mean the user either desired a Goth theme or had made a significant mistake.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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