I made a brief run out to Home Depot after work and had to wait awhile at the checkout because two of the four self checkout stations were out of commission. The first one had a large piece of paper taped to it that read “Out Of Cash”. The second was a bit more interesting, it was in a state of constantly rebooting. I walked up just in time to witness the famed Windows NT blue screen of death. While waiting it line it slowly crawled through the boot process, eventually making it to the desktop just to blue screen again and start all over. One thing that stood out to me was how incredibly slow this system seemed to be.
After seeing that I wasn’t exactly thrilled to feed my credit card to one of the working self check out machines.
I remember when these self check out systems went it, less that two years ago. Seems odd that such a recent system would run such an old OS with some many known problems. I wonder if Home Depot writes a big check to Microsoft every year to keep these systems afloat.