I've had some "interesting" crashes in my time as a Windows user. I'm sure I don't need to bore you all with the details, because you've all been there - you've been working on something for a solid hour, it's approaching perfection, you're just about to save, and - BOOM! In one particularly ironic case, a program crashed because I hit Ctrl-S. Luckily it did actually save the file (without corruption) before crashing.

But this post isn't about windows crashes. This post is about the crash sound effect. You know, the one that plays when the "ahhhh that hurt program go die now" dialog box comes up. Various versions of Windows have had different crash sound effects; varying from a roar of a big cat in the Windows 98 Plus! jungle theme, all the way to a single apologetic note in Windows XP which is somewhat reminiscent of a computer smacking its forehead: "Duh!"

Eons ago, I had the Windows 98 jungle roar. "Roooooaaaaawr!" my computer would scream every time it crashed - which, on Windows 98, was about every 5 minutes. Inevitably, I tired of this rather intrusive sound effect and went in search of a better one. I settled on the death sound from Maelstrom - the echoing sound of doom and despair that plays as your ship is torn apart by an alien's bullet.

A while later, after a reformat or two, I discovered Homestar Runner. That site has a sound downloads section. One of the sounds was Homestar saying "Oops - you broke it." Naturally, I just had to install it as my crash sound.

This proved to be rather infuriating, though, as most often it was the computer's (or programmer's) fault, not mine, that it had crashed! So eventually I turned it off, and set the crash sound to silent.

Fast-forward to the Crispy Now Has Windows XP era. Most of the Windows XP sounds are quite non-intrusive but helpful, so I kept many of them enabled for a while; including the afore-mentioned head-smacking crash sound.

Today, though, I had Little Britain on the brain - particularly the catch phrase of one of the characters, "computer says no". I'm not sure if it's shown in the US at all, so many of you may not recognise it - but if you've seen it, it's hilarious.

It occurred to me, while messing around with C++ programming and having the program crash once or twice, that this would be the perfect Windows crash sound! Want to save your file? "Computer says no." Want to play a game? "Computer says no." Besides injecting a note of hilarity into an otherwise frustrating experience, it also sums up the situation quite elegantly, like no error message can ever hope to do. Why can't you do this? Because the computer said you can't! Live with it, sucker!

So I searched around, and in due course found a couple of recordings of the catch phrase. Unfortunately, they were of low quality and had rather too much static in the background.

Fortunately, I have Audacity installed! A few minutes with the noise removal tool, and the catch phrase sounds as good as new.

I present it here for your listening pleasure: Computer says "no". (257.2 KB) You too can have your computer tell you the ultimate cause of the error every time it crashes! Huzzah!

And before I sign off, this post would not be complete without an idea for a drug education campaign.

C:\> takedrugs.exe

Computer says "NO..."