Raymond Chen shares Windows 3.1 support tale: customer sets all colors to black
A Microsoft developer recounts how a customer's all-black goth theme left them unable to see anything on screen.
What to know
- Raymond Chen published a Windows 3.1 support case where a customer made their desktop invisible by setting every system color to black for a goth theme.
- The story illustrates a real debugging challenge: distinguishing between broken drivers, compositor failures, and user configuration mistakes when presented with a black screen.
- The anecdote spread across developer communities (Hacker News, Lobsters, Mastodon) with developers finding the user error relatable and amusing.
This is a relatable user mistake that most developers have encountered in some form.
-
“Haven't we all been this numpty at some point in our lives?”
samir@functional.computer · Mastodon ↗
Raymond Chen Windows developer, The Old New Thing blogger
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump posts
-
2
Story gains traction on Lobsters with 73 points
The story climbs discussion rankings on the Lobsters developer community, generating 10 comments and high engagement.
-
> “the person who normally draws stuff is hung.” are we seriously not doing phrasing anymore?! :D
2 more of the top 3 · 11 posts in this stretch
-
The Old New Thing continues to deliver https:// devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewt hing/20261029-00/?p=112808/
-
> If you hold a PC’s power button for 12 seconds, it will turn off at the hardware level without notifying the operating system. […] After eight seconds of the power button being held down, the Windows kernel realizes that the user is trying to do a force-power-off of the system, […] What? *12 seconds?* That’s just wrong. I’ve seen it done with…
-
-
1
Developer community shares the story with amusement
The post spreads across developer platforms including Mastodon, where users comment on the relatable nature of the mistake and Windows history.
“Haven't we all been this numpty at some point in our lives?”
— samir@functional.computer -
Haven’t we all been this numpty at some point in our lives? Back in the Windows 3.1 days, there was a customer product support call that would today have been classified as a “black screen” bug: The customer reported that they turned on the computer, and Windows started up, but when the logo went away, all they saw was a blank screen. After some…
-
-
background
Raymond Chen publishes Windows 3.1 black screen support story — Chen, a 30-year Windows veteran, posts to his blog The Old New Thing a customer support case from the Windows 3.1 era where a user set every possible color in the system to black for a goth theme, making the desktop completely invisible.
What people are saying 8 voices from 1 site · best of 12 · verbatim
- Nov 1
-
I did something similarly stupid when I got my first cell phone. I set the language to some non-English, non-Latin character language thinking it would be cool. When I hit save it took me to the home screen, and I realized I didn't know the correct order of button presses to get back to the Language Select screen. Took me ages of trial and error…
- Oct 31
-
Lol.. TIL.. Back in college3, I was so annoyed by i3lock behaviour that I installed xscreensaver just to avoid seeing all white screen.
-
When trying out an earlier version of @abnercoimbre 's terminal awhile back, I found a slider for entire window opacity. Dragging it around, I found it would let you make the window 100% transparent. I let go, and promptly discovered that windows decides that if a pixel on a window is entirely transparent, it isn't part of the window anymore. So I…
-
ACPI / UEFI spec is 4 seconds: https://uefi.org/htmlspecs/ACPI_Spec_6_4_html/04_ACPI_Hardware_Specification/ACPI_Hardware_Specification.html > Power Button Override > User sequence (press the power button for 4 seconds) to turn off a hung system.
-
This is the very reason why i3lock doesn’t default to turning the screen black :) (In the early days of i3lock, black and white were easily available in the X11 wire protocol, so i3lock defaulted to an all-white screen. Later, we changed it to a shade of grey for ergonomics.)
-
Yeah, stipple background should always be preferred as default to the solid black but alas…
-
Yes I remember playing with keyboard layouts in ratpoison and more than once being trapped with nothing but black..How do you press ctrl-t with a russian keyboard 😅
-
When using minimalist window managers on Unix, I have also at least once been confused as to whether the system had booted or not.