Microsoft is trying hard (although sometimes it doesn’t seem very hard) to make using Windows as reliable and secure as possible. It’s also true, let’s be fair, that both the size of the operating system and the monstrous reach it has (over a plethora of devices, each from its father and mother) make it more prone to failures than failures. Do not do it. Mind you, it’s not an excuse, but it explains at least some of them.

So all users want their Windows installation to be as reliable as possible and therefore error free and Microsoft publishes a large amount of technical documentation dedicated to helping users and system administrators in this regard. And generally, when there is a problem, they get to work quickly to try to solve it. Sometimes they accomplish this in days (even hours in some cases), although there are other issues that may fester, taking weeks, months, or in some specific cases, years to finally be resolved.

So is all of Microsoft’s effort dedicated to making sure Windows is always reliable? Well, the truth is, no. Of course the vast majority do, but it turns out that if we look a little, We can also search for information in the opposite directionthat is, how we can “break” our Windows installation, whether it causes a blue screen, system freeze, or memory leak.

The most recent example of this can be found in The Old New Thing, Redmond’s official developer-focused blog, in which Microsoft explains how to cause a system crash in Windows. And if you didn’t know, it turns out to be much easier than it might seem, because there is both a keyboard shortcut to instantly reach the blue screen and an application with which we will have much more control over the error we want to provoke.

The keyboard method is to hold down the Control key and press the Scroll Lock key twice without releasing it, although this method may not work in all cases. Therefore, for greater control, they recommend using the NotMyFault application, which is part of the SysInternals suite of applications and which, as indicated above, provides us with a graphical interface from which we can immediately we can customize and cause Windows to crash.

And why would you want to cause a crash in Windows? The fact that the publication is on a blog specifically aimed at developers already puts us on the right track, that checking the application’s resilience to failure is an essential stage of development. But it may also happen that you simply want to check how your computer is recovering from a blue screen or crash, which you can also check with this app.