Crashes & Hangs: Why and How to Fix it

If you are reading this you probably are experiencing one of those  annoying  crashes that forces to make u hit the ‘restart’ button on your CPU but instead of hitting the restart button there are a lot of things that you can do to prevent these annoying crashes and hangs. First of all let us look into what a crash or hang really means.

CRASH

A crash occurs when a program exits an application unexpectedly after encountering an error . Mostly  after these crashes occur the Windows provides an error report with details of the Error.

HANG

Hang is a situation in which the computer encounters an error in a program and completely or temperely stops responding to the inputs of the user,this types of errors can make you hit the restart button, which is pretty annoying !

CAUSES

 Now let us see how these crashes and hangs are caused.

There are two major causes of crashes and hangs

1) Software errors  2) Hardware malfunctions.

1)  SOFTWARE ERRORS

Almost 70% of all the crashes are caused because of software bugs and in this 50% are caused due to viruses.

Viruses and worms are the major causes of crashes and hangs, they inter-fear with he normal functioning of any application and hence cause a huge amount of crashes and hangs.

When we open an application the computer compiles the thousands of lines of program code to make the program do what it is meant to,when there are some execution errors in this programs the compiler exits or hangs during execution thus causing a hang or a crash .

For example: Several years ago the well known Swedish aeronautical company SAAB lost almost 8 JAS 39  fighter aircraft which costs almost $40million due to a bug in the program for its flight control software, which caused its on-board computer to hang.

2) HARDWARE MALFUNCTION

Some crashes and hangs can also be caused hardware malfunctions which cause the computer to not work normally.

There are many causes namely overheating, dying motherboard ,faulty ram, graphics card ,hard disk failures or file corruptions, Power Supply(PSU) of the computer providing inaccurate DC voltages etc..

Overheating during CPU and GPU intensive applications like computer gaming can cause a lot of nasty crashes

Faulty graphics card can be easily detected if there is a presence of coloured or black lines or dots randomly appearing on the monitor. These types of malfunctions with the graphics card can cause crashes.

Data corruption is also a major cause of crashes as it makes data unreadable by the computer causing fatal errors.

A power supply unit (PSU) is like the heart of the computer. It must provide the right amount of dc voltages to all the components in order to make all the components to function properly

All the voltages namely +12v, +5v & +3.3v must be within ATX specifications. These levels can be checked in the bios.

PREVENTIVE MEASURES

1. A good antivirus software must be employed and a full scan must be done atleast in every week.

2. If program bugs causes crashes the program must be reinstalled or a new program from a verified source    must be used.

3. The temperatures of the components must be constantly monitored. Usually for the graphics card a temperature more than 85"C is usually considered high but may depend upon the manufacturer. The cooling fans must be clear of dust and must be verified whether it is running.

4. The PSU voltages must be constantly monitored to prevent loss of data and hence leading to crashes.

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...........................................................................Submitted  By :

.......................................................................................NISHEL Lesly