Sneaking into the auditorium for the Windows 2000 launch rehearsal

2026-11-02T18:12:48+00:00

The Windows 2000 launch in San Francisco was accompanied by an expo, and a large number of Windows 2000 team members were dispatched to run the various booths and stations, give informal presentations on the new features of Windows 2000, and answer technical questions from the various attendees. And from among the people who were sent to the expo, a smaller group was selected to attend the launch event itself in person.

Related reading: A ticket to the Windows 95 launch.

After a few of us arrived early at the Civic Auditorium for the launch event, we had to entertain ourselves until the doors opened. There was some speculation as to who the celebrity host would be, since it hadn’t been announced. One of my colleagues tried to sneak into what looked like a VIP tent.¹ I, on the other hand, went exploring.

I found an unlocked door that took me into the empty upper level of the main auditorium.

I took a seat and tried not to be noticed.

The stage was set up with a 10-meter tall mock laptop, screens to the left and right of the stage for projecting slides, prerecorded videos, or to get a better look at on-stage close-ups, gray curtains unobtrusively hung to shield from view what would turn out to be various surprises throughout the event, and various other desks, demo areas, and even an airplane cabin set.²

While I sat and took in the complexity of the stage, there was an announcement that they would be rehearsing the opening in one minute. The lights dimmed in preparation. The lid of the giant laptop closed very slowly.

About ten minutes after the announcement, the rehearsal actually began.

The laptop lid opened, and on the laptop screen, it looked like someone was signing into Windows 2000, and then the mouse clicked the Start button. This led to a video montage, and when the montage was over, a voice announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Patrick Stewart!”

Oh my goodness, Patrick Stewart is going to be the presenter for the Windows 2000 launch!

Mere seconds later, onto the stage bounded… a crew member wearing a headset pretending to be Patrick Stewart so that the camera and lighting crew could make sure they were properly positioned.

Okay, that’s the end of the rehearsal. The lights come back on, and the auditorium once again buzzes with the sound of equipment being moved and people discussing things.

I left the auditorium and went back to join the crowd of people waiting to get in. I didn’t tell them who the host was.

The event itself seemed to go off pretty much as planned. With the real Patrick Stewart.

Patrick Stewart had such a commanding presence. If he had come out on stage and announced, “It is the dawn of a new era: The era of lime Jell-O”, people would say, “Yeah, lime Jell-O, I need to upgrade to lime Jell-O.” But instead of trying to spark a new dessert trend, he talked about Windows 2000, reading words from a teleprompter that he almost certainly didn’t understand, but he made them sound great.

¹ My colleague eventually returned with a Commemorative Edition boxed copy of Windows 2000.

² The airplane cabin was used for a sketch that demonstrated mobile business computing. The demoer took their laptop on a plane trip, where they happened to sit next to a character named William Wentworth, portrayed by actor John O’Hurley, president of William Wentworth Worldwide. (He gave his email address as www@www.com.) The sketch demonstrated infrared file sharing and other mobile scenarios. Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.

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Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

The support case of a customer who said that all they could see was a black screen

2026-10-31T01:01:21+00:00

If you hold a PC’s power button for 12 seconds, it will turn off at the hardware level without notifying the operating system. This is a safety feature so that you can turn of the computer even if the operating system’s “Shut down” command isn’t working.

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, and it quickly takes a kernel dump that can be uploaded to the Windows Error Reporting service the next time you turn the system on. (Sometimes four seconds isn’t enough time to get enough information, and the kernel dump is incomplete. I believe that on Windows Insider builds of Windows, you get a message that says something like “Please let go of the power button so we can collect more information, and then we will turn off the computer.” This gives the kernel more time to finish capturing its kernel dump.)

These emergency kernel dumps are internally classified as “long power button hold” (LPBH) failures. One of the pieces of information recorded in these emergency kernel dumps is whether the screen consists entirely of black pixels. Those failures are sub-classified as “black screen LPBH”, and they go to a special virtual team for analysis. (I happen to be a member of this black screen LPBH team.)

Sometimes the problem is a broken video driver. Sometimes the video driver is doing just fine, but the desktop compositor is just handing black pixels to the video driver. Sometimes the desktop compositor is doing just fine, but nobody is drawing anything to the screen. And those cases are further subdivided further into cases like “there is nobody around to draw anything” or “the person who normally draws stuff is hung.”

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 questioning, the customer support engineer put the story together: It turned out that this customer really liked the color black, so they decided to set up a goth theme. They set the wallpaper color to black. They set the title bar color to black. They set the button color to black. They set the window background color to black. They set the window text color to black. Every possible color you could pick in the Colors control panel was set to black.

Once you get yourself into this situation, it’s hard to get out because you can’t see anything.

I don’t know how the customer support engineer fixed the problem, but I’m guessing that they booted into MS-DOS, ran EDIT.COM, and deleted the [colors] section from the win.ini file, thereby returning all the system colors to defaults.

devblogs.microsoft.com

Sneaking into the auditorium for the Windows 2000 launch rehearsal

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The support case of a customer who said that all they could see was a black screen

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