Windows fails to tip the scales in grocery store deployment

Recovery from an excess of sprouts, or something else?

Bork!Bork!Bork! Microsoft's flagship OS can power everything from a mini PC to a giant workstation or even a server. But using it for a grocery-store scale might just be overkill.

Weighing fruit and vegetables has always presented a particular challenge. Register readers of a certain age might remember a cheery greengrocer having a set of scales in their shop, ready to weigh produce. This mechanical marvel succumbed to digitization, and the cheery greengrocer was eventually phased out in favor of self-service devices in sprawling supermarkets, and we are where we are today.

Scales showing a Windows Recovery screen - Pic courtesy Shaukat Abbas

Judging by the image above, sent in by an eagle-eyed Register reader Shaukat Abbas, Windows appears unable to do the one thing the customer needs: deal with the delights of the fruit and vegetable aisle.

Like many of us after the excesses of the festive period, this device is in recovery. Perhaps one sprout too many? It's hard to tell, though the error code 0xc0000001 suggests something may have gone wrong with the device's disk. We'd guess a shutdown was attempted and Windows said "nope," opting instead for Recovery.

We're sure that every shopper carries around a handy USB recovery disk and keyboard to plug into the afflicted device. However, something like that would certainly qualify as an unexpected item in the bagging area.

At a guess, we'd reckon this is a Windows 10 device and, although most support for the operating system ended in 2025, some editions remain in Microsoft's good books. There is also the possibility that the store, in this case a Marks & Spencer in the West Midlands, has Extended Security Updates enabled.

We're not sure that equipping stores with self-service Point Of Sale devices or self-printing labels for bags of fruit and vegetables is necessarily a good thing. Powering such a machine with Microsoft Windows is really unnecessary for something that needs to do one job really well, instead of a multitude of tasks … less well.

Perhaps today's bork points more to a need for the human touch, rather than some recovery media to get the scales running once more. ®