Er, what?

Ever had a frustrating day when nothing goes right, and then to cap it all off your PC crashes with some unintelligible message that you feel thick for not being able to understand, and you end up hunting around on the manufacturer's website only to find no-one else in the entire world has ever had the same problem, and therefore the manufacturer concludes that in fact either a) there is no problem or b) you're stupid?

Well it's not only you. And chances are if the message seems unintelligible, you're not imagining it, it probably is. When Ben Ezzell of Guerneville, California was researching his latest book "Developing Windows Error Messages", he and his publisher O'Reilly & Associates asked people to send in some of their favourite bad error messages.

For ones that are guaranteed to cause a bit of head scratching and some severe metaphysical uncertainty, here are some of the best.

1) "The procedure failed with the following error: the command completed successfully. "(Oh, good... I think...)

2) "Error: keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue or Del to enter setup." (Someone's having a laugh, surely.)

3) "Your mouse is not working. Please click here to acknowledge."

4) "Contest entries." (????)

5) "Windows has found an unknown device and is installing a driver for it." (Hmmm, that'll be the generic 'unknown device' driver then. If you can get drivers for unknown devices how come I have to search the Epson website from top to bottom for the correct driver every time I want to reinstall my printer?)

6) "You need to supply a fax number in order for your request not to receive fax notifications to be processed."

7) "Your system shell has changed. The Compaq software will work with your new shell, but the new shell will not work with your Compaq software. Do you wish to keep your Compaq software working? Click Yes if you are unsure." (Can I have the options again please?)

8) "Printer on fire." (Oh my God, is it?!!!) NB. This is a unix error, apparently it has been changed in version 2.4.20 to read 'unknown error' instead of 'on fire'. How dull.