If you’re ever stuck in a Windows blue screen of death, there are three keystrokes you can use to kill the computer.

  1. Press “F5” to force a restart.
  2. Press “Esc” to close all open windows and return to the desktop.
  3. Type “cmd” into the command prompt and press “Enter.”

This isn’t a bug, it’s a “feature” in Windows that is designed to let users trigger a crash dump for testing purposes. There’s even a whole Microsoft KB article on the subject.

To enable this feature, open up regedit and then browse down to one of these keys, depending on your keyboard type:

USB Keyboard

PS/2 Keyboard

Now right-click on the right-hand pane and add a new DWORD key named CrashOnCtrlScroll, giving it a value of 1.

Reboot your computer, and when it starts back up you can trigger the Blue Screen of Death by using the following keyboard shortcut:

To remove this “feature” you can just delete the registry key and then restart your computer again.

Please note that following this article WILL crash your computer… really isn’t very useful, but it’s lots of fun =)