10 rea­sons why PCs crash U must Know

Fatal error: the sys­tem has become unsta­ble or is busy,” it says. “Enter to return to Win­dows or press Control-​​Alt-​​Delete to restart your com­puter. If you do this you will lose any unsaved infor­ma­tion in all open applications.”

You have just been struck by the Blue Screen of Death. Any­one who uses Mcft Win­dows will be famil­iar with this. What can you do? More impor­tantly, how can you pre­vent it happening?

1 Hard­ware conflict

The num­ber one rea­son why Win­dows crashes is hard­ware con­flict. Each hard­ware device com­mu­ni­cates to other devices through an inter­rupt request chan­nel (IRQ). These are sup­posed to be unique for each device.

For exam­ple, a printer usu­ally con­nects inter­nally on IRQ 7. The key­board usu­ally uses IRQ 1 and the floppy disk drive IRQ 6. Each device will try to hog a sin­gle IRQ for itself.

If there are a lot of devices, or if they are not installed prop­erly, two of them may end up shar­ing the same IRQ num­ber. When the user tries to use both devices at the same time, a crash can hap­pen. The way to check if your com­puter has a hard­ware con­flict is through the fol­low­ing route:

* Start-​​Settings-​​Control Panel-​​System-​​Device Manager.

Often if a device has a prob­lem a yel­low ‘!’ appears next to its descrip­tion in the Device Man­ager. High­light Com­puter (in the Device Man­ager) and press Prop­er­ties to see the IRQ num­bers used by your com­puter. If the IRQ num­ber appears twice, two devices may be using it.

Some­times a device might share an IRQ with some­thing described as ‘IRQ holder for PCI steer­ing’. This can be ignored. The best way to fix this prob­lem is to remove the prob­lem device and rein­stall it.

Some­times you may have to find more recent dri­vers on the inter­net to make the device func­tion prop­erly. A good resource is www​.dri​ver​guide​.com. If the device is a sound­card, or a modem, it can often be fixed by mov­ing it to a dif­fer­ent slot on the moth­er­board (be care­ful about open­ing your com­puter, as you may void the warranty).

When work­ing inside a com­puter you should switch it off, unplug the mains lead and touch an unpainted metal sur­face to dis­charge any sta­tic electricity.

To be fair to Mcft, the prob­lem with IRQ num­bers is not of its mak­ing. It is a legacy prob­lem going back to the first PC designs using the IBM 8086 chip. Ini­tially there were only eight IRQs. Today there are 16 IRQs in a PC. It is easy to run out of them. There are plans to increase the num­ber of IRQs in future designs.

2 Bad Ram

Ram (random-​​access mem­ory) prob­lems might bring on the blue screen of death with a mes­sage say­ing Fatal Excep­tion Error. A fatal error indi­cates a seri­ous hard­ware prob­lem. Some­times it may mean a part is dam­aged and will need replacing.

But a fatal error caused by Ram might be caused by a mis­match of chips. For exam­ple, mix­ing 70-​​nanosecond (70ns) Ram with 60ns Ram will usu­ally force the com­puter to run all the Ram at the slower speed. This will often crash the machine if the Ram is overworked.

One way around this prob­lem is to enter the BIOS set­tings and increase the wait state of the Ram. This can make it more sta­ble. Another way to trou­bleshoot a sus­pected Ram prob­lem is to rearrange the Ram chips on the moth­er­board, or take some of them out. Then try to repeat the cir­cum­stances that caused the crash. When han­dling Ram try not to touch the gold con­nec­tions, as they can be eas­ily damaged.

Par­ity error mes­sages also refer to Ram. Mod­ern Ram chips are either par­ity (ECC) or non par­ity (non-​​ECC). It is best not to mix the two types, as this can be a cause of trouble.

EMM386 error mes­sages refer to mem­ory prob­lems but may not be con­nected to bad Ram. This may be due to free mem­ory prob­lems often linked to old Dos-​​based programmes.

3 BIOS settings

Every moth­er­board is sup­plied with a range of chipset set­tings that are decided in the fac­tory. A com­mon way to access these set­tings is to press the F2 or delete but­ton dur­ing the first few sec­onds of a boot-​​up.

Once inside the BIOS, great care should be taken. It is a good idea to write down on a piece of paper all the set­tings that appear on the screen. That way, if you change some­thing and the com­puter becomes more unsta­ble, you will know what set­tings to revert to.

A com­mon BIOS error con­cerns the CAS latency. This refers to the Ram. Older EDO (extended data out) Ram has a CAS latency of 3. Newer SDRam has a CAS latency of 2. Set­ting the wrong fig­ure can cause the Ram to lock up and freeze the computer’s display.

Mcft Win­dows is bet­ter at allo­cat­ing IRQ num­bers than any BIOS. If pos­si­ble set the IRQ num­bers to Auto in the BIOS. This will allow Win­dows to allo­cate the IRQ num­bers (make sure the BIOS set­ting for Plug and Play OS is switched to ‘yes’ to allow Win­dows to do this.).

4 Hard disk drives

After a few weeks, the infor­ma­tion on a hard disk drive starts to become piece­meal or frag­mented. It is a good idea to defrag­ment the hard disk every week or so, to pre­vent the disk from caus­ing a screen freeze. Go to

* Start-​​Programs-​​Accessories-​​System Tools-​​Disk Defragmenter

This will start the pro­ce­dure. You will be unable to write data to the hard drive (to save it) while the disk is defrag­ment­ing, so it is a good idea to sched­ule the pro­ce­dure for a period of inac­tiv­ity using the Task Scheduler.

The Task Sched­uler should be one of the small icons on the bot­tom right of the Win­dows open­ing page (the desktop).

Some lock­ups and screen freezes caused by hard disk prob­lems can be solved by reduc­ing the read-​​ahead opti­mi­sa­tion. This can be adjusted by going to

* Start-​​Settings-​​Control Panel-​​System Icon-​​Performance-​​File System-​​Hard Disk.

Hard disks will slow down and crash if they are too full. Do some house­keep­ing on your hard drive every few months and free some space on it. Open the Win­dows folder on the C drive and find the Tem­po­rary Inter­net Files folder. Delet­ing the con­tents (not the folder) can free a lot of space.

Empty the Recy­cle Bin every week to free more space. Hard disk dri­ves should be scanned every week for errors or bad sec­tors. Go to

* Start-​​Programs-​​Accessories-​​System Tools-​​ScanDisk

Oth­er­wise assign the Task Sched­uler to per­form this oper­a­tion at night when the com­puter is not in use.

5 Fatal OE excep­tions and VXD errors

Fatal OE excep­tion errors and VXD errors are often caused by video card problems.

These can often be resolved eas­ily by reduc­ing the res­o­lu­tion of the video dis­play. Go to

* Start-​​Settings-​​Control Panel-​​Display-​​Settings

Here you should slide the screen area bar to the left. Take a look at the colour set­tings on the left of that win­dow. For most desk­tops, high colour 16-​​bit depth is adequate.

If the screen freezes or you expe­ri­ence sys­tem lock­ups it might be due to the video card. Make sure it does not have a hard­ware con­flict. Go to

* Start-​​Settings-​​Control Panel-​​System-​​Device Manager

Here, select the + beside Dis­play Adapter. A line of text describ­ing your video card should appear. Select it (make it blue) and press prop­er­ties. Then select Resources and select each line in the win­dow. Look for a mes­sage that says No Conflicts.

If you have video card hard­ware con­flict, you will see it here. Be care­ful at this point and make a note of every­thing you do in case you make things worse.

The way to resolve a hard­ware con­flict is to uncheck the Use Auto­matic Set­tings box and hit the Change Set­tings but­ton. You are search­ing for a set­ting that will dis­play a No Con­flicts message.

Another use­ful way to resolve video prob­lems is to go to

* Start-​​Settings-​​Control Panel-​​System-​​Performance-​​Graphics

Here you should move the Hard­ware Accel­er­a­tion slider to the left. As ever, the most com­mon cause of prob­lems relat­ing to graph­ics cards is old or faulty dri­vers (a dri­ver is a small piece of soft­ware used by a com­puter to com­mu­ni­cate with a device).

Look up your video card’s man­u­fac­turer on the inter­net and search for the most recent dri­vers for it.

6 Viruses

Often the first sign of a virus infec­tion is insta­bil­ity. Some viruses erase the boot sec­tor of a hard drive, mak­ing it impos­si­ble to start. This is why it is a good idea to cre­ate a Win­dows start-​​up disk. Go to

* Start-​​Settings-​​Control Panel-​​Add/​Remove Programs

Here, look for the Start Up Disk tab. Virus pro­tec­tion requires con­stant vigilance.

A virus scan­ner requires a list of virus sig­na­tures in order to be able to iden­tify viruses. These sig­na­tures are stored in a DAT file. DAT files should be updated weekly from the web­site of your antivirus soft­ware manufacturer.

An excel­lent antivirus pro­gramme is McAfee VirusS­can by Net­work Asso­ciates ( www​.nai​.com). Another is Nor­ton AntiVirus 2000, made by Syman­tec ( www​.syman​tec​.com).

7 Print­ers

The action of send­ing a doc­u­ment to print cre­ates a big­ger file, often called a post­script file.

Print­ers have only a small amount of mem­ory, called a buffer. This can be eas­ily over­loaded. Print­ing a doc­u­ment also uses a con­sid­er­able amount of CPU power. This will also slow down the computer’s performance.

If the printer is try­ing to print unusual char­ac­ters, these might not be recog­nised, and can crash the com­puter. Some­times print­ers will not recover from a crash because of con­fu­sion in the buffer. A good way to clear the buffer is to unplug the printer for ten sec­onds. Boot­ing up from a pow­er­less state, also called a cold boot, will restore the printer’s default set­tings and you may be able to carry on.

8 Soft­ware

A com­mon cause of com­puter crash is faulty or badly-​​installed soft­ware. Often the prob­lem can be cured by unin­stalling the soft­ware and then rein­stalling it. Use Nor­ton Unin­stall or Unin­stall Shield to remove an appli­ca­tion from your sys­tem prop­erly. This will also remove ref­er­ences to the pro­gramme in the Sys­tem Reg­istry and leaves the way clear for a com­pletely fresh copy.

The Sys­tem Reg­istry can be cor­rupted by old ref­er­ences to obso­lete soft­ware that you thought was unin­stalled. Use Reg Cleaner by Jouni Vuo­rio to clean up the Sys­tem Reg­istry and remove obso­lete entries. It works on Win­dows 95, Win­dows 98, Win­dows 98 SE (Sec­ond Edi­tion), Win­dows Mil­len­nium Edi­tion (ME), NT4 and Win­dows 2000.

Read the instruc­tions and use it care­fully so you don’t do per­ma­nent dam­age to the Reg­istry. If the Reg­istry is dam­aged you will have to rein­stall your oper­at­ing sys­tem. Reg Cleaner can be obtained from www​.jv16​.org

Often a Win­dows prob­lem can be resolved by enter­ing Safe Mode. This can be done dur­ing start-​​up. When you see the mes­sage “Start­ing Win­dows” press F4. This should take you into Safe Mode.

Safe Mode loads a min­i­mum of dri­vers. It allows you to find and fix prob­lems that pre­vent Win­dows from load­ing properly.

Some­times installing Win­dows is dif­fi­cult because of unsuit­able BIOS set­tings. If you keep get­ting SUWIN error mes­sages (Win­dows setup) dur­ing the Win­dows instal­la­tion, then try enter­ing the BIOS and dis­abling the CPU inter­nal cache. Try to dis­able the Level 2 (L2) cache if that doesn’t work.

Remem­ber to restore all the BIOS set­tings back to their for­mer set­tings fol­low­ing installation.

9 Over­heat­ing

Cen­tral pro­cess­ing units (CPUs) are usu­ally equipped with fans to keep them cool. If the fan fails or if the CPU gets old it may start to over­heat and gen­er­ate a par­tic­u­lar kind of error called a ker­nel error. This is a com­mon prob­lem in chips that have been over­clocked to oper­ate at higher speeds than they are sup­posed to.

One rem­edy is to get a big­ger bet­ter fan and install it on top of the CPU. Spe­cial­ist cool­ing fans/​heatsinks are avail­able from www​.com​put​ern​erd​.com or www​.coolit​.com

CPU prob­lems can often be fixed by dis­abling the CPU inter­nal cache in the BIOS. This will make the machine run more slowly, but it should also be more stable.

10 Power sup­ply problems

With all the new con­struc­tion going on around the coun­try the steady sup­ply of elec­tric­ity has become dis­rupted. A power surge or spike can crash a com­puter as eas­ily as a power cut.

If this has become a nui­sance for you then con­sider buy­ing a unin­ter­rupted power sup­ply (UPS). This will give you a clean power sup­ply when there is elec­tric­ity, and it will give you a few min­utes to per­form a con­trolled shut­down in case of a power cut.

It is a good invest­ment if your data are crit­i­cal, because a power cut will cause any unsaved data to be lost.

Say thanks .… .

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