Forcing a BSOD

The Blue Screen of Death is one of the most unpleasant events a person can face. It ranks right up there with doing your income taxes, the unexpected visit from your least favorite relative, and hemmorhodial flare ups. However, there are times when you actually want to have a BSOD event happen. Maybe you're doing some extreme failover testing, or maybe you want to show how your software can recover from a disastrous situation.

If that's the case, then you need a consistent way to force a BSOD. The steps below show you how to do it:

1. Go to Start>Run, and launch the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters.
3. Go to Edit, select New | DWORD Value and name the new value CrashOnCtrlScroll.
4. Double-click the CrashOnCtrlScroll DWORD Value, type 1 in the Value Data textbox, and click OK.
5. Close the Registry Editor and restart your system.

When you want to force a BSOD, press and hold the [Ctrl] key on the right side of your keyboard, and then press the [ScrollLock] key twice. The BSOD will appear.

Note: If your system reboots instead of displaying the BSOD, you'll have to disable the Automatically Restart setting in the System Properties dialog box. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Press [Windows]-Break.
2. Select the Advanced tab.
3. Click the Settings button in the Startup And Recovery panel.
4. Clear the Automatically Restart check box in the System Failure panel.
5. Click OK twice.