Crashes

Picture yourself happily typing away on your keyboard when suddenly the screen freezes. Your keyboard and mouse stop functioning. Nothing is happening. Your computer has crashed. Although it seems so traumatic, the truth is systems crash. It's one of computing facts of life.

The term "crash" refers to a critical failure in a computer, device, or software application. Crashes often occur with little or no warning and can reveal themselves in many ways. The computer may "freeze" or "hang" indefinitely, or it may display any number of error messages including "fatal exceptions", "general protection fault", or the infamous "blue screen of death" where a blue background contains cryptic messages apparently telling someone from another planet what has happened. To recover from a crash, we usually power down and restart the computer.

The first thought to enter your mind after a crash is "What did I do?" Perhaps nothing. Computer crashes aren't necessarily your fault. The most frequent cause of crashes is the incompatibility of software.
Most of us believe that if a software package exists, it can go on our machine. Often, two pieces of software will simply not get along. The computer comes to a halt because it does not know what to do. For example, if you are using a microphone to record your voice and then turn on a media player to play songs, both programs will need to use the sound card. This type of interaction leads to trouble on a computer. This holds true of cameras, scanners, printers, etc.

Another typical problem is insufficient memory. The software wants more memory than you have or another program did not release its memory.
Occasionally, failures can be blamed on the user. One contributing factor is lack of training; another is overzealous clicking. Sometimes what we call a crash may be just incorrect use of the program or simple lack of patience.

The list of hazards goes on and on. You could fall prey to a virus that eats or corrupts files. You may accidentally delete a critical system file. Not to mention the inevitable, yet simple human mistake; no matter how many years you've been computing, the day will come when you respond incorrectly and suddenly, your precious data is gone.

Less frequently, but more seriously, crashes will occur due to hardware failure. Electrical surges can shut down a computer and cause loss of unsaved data or critical components can fail. Sometimes our machines won't even start Windows. The screen just sits there looking at us with a blank stare.

If your computer does crash, write down what you were doing at the time. Recreating an error is the best way to explain a problem to a technician. But, remember computers don't last forever. Sometimes a computer just won't recover.