I don’t remember where I first read about this idea, but apparently if you open a lot of Windows Explorer windows (but not as many as you’d think) you can easily crash Windows itself.
Of course I had to try this to verify it.
Naturally I tried this in a virtual machine – no sense hosing my own computer! And sure enough, after opening just 54 Explorer windows, strange things began to happen and the system became unresponsive and weird visual effects started to happen.
Very odd! Although not a problem I’d be worried about over at Microsoft (after all, who in their right mind opens 54+ Explorer windows??), it is a fun little trick – and of course it tells us things about what sorts of resources Explorer might be using – and, roughly, how many of those resources it’s using.
I had openned 184 firefox and it was still working !
It depends on what operating system you’re using – I believe this behavior is caused by a hard limit on the number of window handles. The limit used to be higher in Windows 2000, and before that I don’t think there even WAS a limit. (Of course, none of this applies to Linux or OS X!)