Fake Error & BSOD Generator
A fullscreen blue screen with the right layout, real stop codes, and a percentage that crawls the way the real one does.
For parody, education, and mockups only
Real Windows bug-check names. Naming one cannot cause it.
Appended to the small print, wrapped to the column.
Uncheck to pin it to a fixed number instead.
34%
No logo is drawn, and the QR block encodes nothing. Escape exits fullscreen at any time.
Everything here runs on your device. Nothing you enter is uploaded or stored.
Four crash screens with the correct layout for each, real stop codes, and text you can change. Escape exits immediately.
How to use it
- Choose a layout. Windows 11 and 10 are the sparse modern design; Windows 7 and macOS are dense monospace.
- Pick a stop code, or leave the default.
- Add a custom message if you want one. It wraps to the column rather than running off the edge.
- Press Start. Press Escape whenever you want out.
The modern blue screen is mostly empty, and that is the point
Ask someone to draw a blue screen from memory and they will fill it. The real Windows 10 and 11 crash screen does the opposite: a large sad face about a third of the way down, one two-line sentence, a percentage, and then a small block at the bottom left pairing a QR square with four lines of grey small print. Everything is left-aligned inside a column that begins roughly a seventh of the way across the screen.
That emptiness is most of the effect. A version with centred text and a filled screen reads as a poster about a blue screen rather than a blue screen, and no amount of correct wording fixes it.
The older layout is the opposite problem. Windows 7 and XP printed dense white monospace filling the upper half of the screen: a paragraph of advice, a technical information block, the bug-check value with its four parameters, a driver name with addresses, and then the crash dump progress lines. Both are here, because the dense one is what people picture when they say “blue screen of death” and the sparse one is what they actually see.
Why the percentage crawls
The modern screen shows a collecting-error-info percentage, and on a real machine it does not advance evenly. It moves quickly at first, slows through the middle, and then sits.
This uses a cubic ease-out toward its ceiling rather than a linear ramp, which is the same curve the fake update screen uses and for the same reason: a bar that fills smoothly reads as an animation, and an animation is not what anyone is trying to reproduce. You can also pin the percentage to a fixed number, which is arguably more convincing again — a frozen crash screen at 34 per cent matches what people remember.
Text that wraps
Canvas has no text wrapping. Every drawn interface has to measure and break its own lines, and a custom message running off the right edge is the difference between something convincing and something obviously homemade. Anything you type is measured against the column width and broken at word boundaries, with explicit newlines preserved as paragraph breaks.
What it does not do
It draws no Windows logo or Apple logo, because those are trademarks and reproducing them would not be legitimate. The QR block encodes nothing. It cannot crash your machine, cannot write a dump file, cannot prevent you closing the tab, and cannot stop Escape working — the whole thing is a canvas element painting rectangles and text.
Nothing is uploaded, and no permission is requested.
Layout reference
| Style | Background | Layout |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 11 | #0078d4 | Sparse, sad face, QR block |
| Windows 10 | #0a58c2 | Sparse, sad face, QR block |
| Windows 7 / XP | #000082 | Dense white monospace |
| macOS panic | #000000 | Dense grey monospace |
Stop codes and their bug-check values
| Stop code | Value |
|---|---|
| CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED | 0x000000EF |
| IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL | 0x0000000A |
| PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA | 0x00000050 |
| DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION | 0x00000133 |
| MEMORY_MANAGEMENT | 0x0000001A |
| INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE | 0x0000007B |
Questions
How do I get out of it?
Press Escape. It is bound before the screen appears, and it works whether the browser granted true fullscreen or fell back to a fixed overlay. The Exit button does the same if there is no keyboard to hand.
Are the stop codes real?
Yes, and deliberately so. An invented stop code is the immediate tell, because anyone who has seen a real crash recognises the vocabulary. These are public Windows bug-check names from Microsoft's own documentation, printed with their correct hex values on the legacy layouts. Naming one cannot cause it.
Is the QR code scannable?
No, and that is on purpose. It has the three finder squares and a plausible speckle, which is all the eye checks at a glance, but it encodes nothing. Drawing a scannable code would mean pointing someone's phone at a URL we chose for them.
Why does the modern blue screen look so empty?
Because the real one is. A sad face about a third of the way down, one sentence, a percentage, then small print and a QR block at the bottom left, all left-aligned in a column that starts a seventh of the way in. Clones centre everything and fill the screen, and that is what makes them look wrong.
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