A Windows error on a gas pump

by Mathew on July 10, 2007 · View Comments

Those of you who subscribe to my Twitter feed will have seen this already, but I just had to blog about something that happened on Friday on the way up to a friend’s cottage in northern Ontario — we stopped for gas at the local Esso station and here is what I saw (click the image below for the full-sized version):

769126422_90e38069b0.jpg

It’s a Windows XP error that says: “The file or directory C:\\XPE_ROOT\system32 is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility.” Luckily, I was still able to get gas :-)

A quick check of Flickr shows that there is a universe of similar shots, including this one and this one and this one — and for some Canadian content, this one.

Share:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • SphereIt
  • StumbleUpon

Tagged as: , ,

  • http://wow.jules.ca jules

    Holy cow.
    I now understand the increasing gas prices. What, with a MS platform, how could they *not* keep rising? ;-)

  • http://rugbymarketing.com Rob

    I met with some MS execs 6 years ago who told me a little known fact about how they were well on their way to dominating the market for software on gas pumps. It appears they thought this was a very important market for them to dominate…

  • kelly

    I’ve been a service Tech for 19 years(on gas pumps)…… I have seen ALOT of changes, and if anyone is interested most systems that run the pumps( The Cash register systems) Must run on windows or similar due to the Credit Card networks such as Visanet, Buypass,Cirrus ect.Require the equipment have an I.P. Address. Everything seems to be networked in one way or another.

  • Jason

    Your looking at the screen of a Wayne Ovation with IMedia. Its a newer dispenser that has a good reputation. It is however the first dispenser that has a windows platform running in it. To say that the dispenser runs on windows is not true, only the customer interface does, the actual “pump” runs seperately and the POS (probably a nucleus) is communicating with the Screen that you are looking at.

    MS might be interested in “dominating” the gas pump industry, but no one in this industry trusts windows for the very reason you can see in the picture. You do see Windows being used on POS’s more now, but it has proved to not be as reliable as a non-windows or standard POS such as the Ruby Supersystem or Gilbarco G-Site. Both Wayne and Gilbarco have POS’s that run on a window’s platform, but the cost is not very attractive to most consumers.

    To make a long story short, the dispenser is trying to sell you a bottle of soda using the windows screen, but the actual dispenser has no interest in windows.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Older post:

Newer post: