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You Know When You’ve Been DesktopImpazzito!!

desktop-dead-20081013.jpg

Sometimes, when Macs die or are horribly injured, their displays turn into beautiful works of electronic art.

Sometimes, though, they just die ugly.

Maybe this one was upset by the number of files stored on the desktop. Whatever the cause, I think “DesktopImpazzito!” is the perfect reaction, even though I haven’t the faintest idea what it means.

(Image used under Creative Commons license. Thanks to Lozofun on Flickr.)

About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He is a columnist for PA, and has written for the BBC, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, MacUser, Macworld, and The Morning News. He has a blog you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

Email the author | Read more posts by Giles Turnbull.

14 comments

    Yep Rev1 MacBook pro died displaying this : http://twitpic.com/g6lj

    Desktop Impazzito = Desktop gone crazy (it’s Italian)

    It looks like Windows OS with a Mac skin is crashing.

    just to say that ‘impazzito’ is Italian for ‘gone crazy’

    It means “Desktop gone crazy”. It’s italian.

    Cheers from Italy!

    I had this happened to me…i tried restarting and shutting off nothing worked
    then my wife turned off the wireless mouse…and then it started to go away..
    started again and then went away…
    and it has not happened since then…

    Desktop impazzito means “desktop gone mad” in italian

    roughly translated from Italian “gone crazy!”

    …”DesktopImpazzito” = “desktop gone mad/crazy/wild” (in Italian)…

    hi i’m the owner of this photo (and desktop :S)
    desktop impazzito in italian means that the desktop is going crazy ;)
    i don’t know which kind of error is, apparently is not very bad, ’cause i can ‘erase’ all these pixel simply moving aroung a window ;)

    just meaninin’ Desktop going crazy in Italian…

    I’ve had that one. Though, it’s not really the best surprise during an editing session.

    i’ve seen better. total failure realm. woman brought in her macbook cause basically half the screen was dead. turned bright blue (the same color we see if you actually watch a full start up) and there were streaks across the rest. cool part was if you drag your finger along the outside of the screen case you can see the screen ripple.

    cause: her fat ass cat sat on the laptop while it was closed (just it was a bit on the warm side) and the pressure broke the screen from the inside. thankfully she bought it with her Amex just a few months ago cause pressure damage is ‘accidental’ and not a free replacement but Amex has some kind of insurance for pricey stuff so they covered it

    Ooh, yowch.

    In reply to lozofun:

    I’ve seen a similar thing with my PowerMac G4 (Sawtooth model, 400 mhz, 1.5 GB RAM, Tiger). Sometimes, particularly if the CPU is being taxed to the limit – which happens frequently with the old machine – I’ll find that windows and such don’t update properly. One thing that happens is that a finder window (or sometimes file icons or names) will be “torn” into two pieces on the screen, separated by a few dozen pixels. if I grab a file, and drag it over the torn window/name/icon, after the dragged file passes over everything looks fine in that area – even if the rest of the window is still “torn”. It’s as if the computer won’t properly update what’s shown on screen, but dragging the file by forces it to update. This happens very frequently with the finder, but can happen with any app.

    I wonder if what you having occurring is somehow related to this phenomenon? It may be software related if the stuff looks fine when it’s being moved.

    I have a feeling that with my old G4, the problems are due to a “technically-unsupported” video card. With only 16 MB VRAM, the Rage 128 video card in the G4 does not support Quartz. The fact that tiger runs as well as it does is rather surprising considering this fact, but it does… I’m not sure why a MacBook would have a problem, unless its a software issue…

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