Why Does Your Computer Crash?

You may have heard of the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ but haven’t experienced it yet. It is better to know the reasons behind this crash so that when it happens you are in position to fix it. If you see on the screen “Fatal error: the system has become unstable or is busy”, “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”. This is the infamous blue screen of death. This could happen due to any of these following reasons:
 
Hardware Problem:
Computer consists of different hardware such as Printer, mouse, flash drive etc. Windows assigns an IRQ number for each of these hardware. When due to some reasons more than one hardware use the same IRQ this will result in a crash. In order to find if you have any hardware conflicts you can go to the ‘Device Manager’ in your computer properties. (Start-Settings->Control Panel –> System->Device manager), an yellow exclamation mark will be placed against the hardware that has a conflict. You can resolve this by selecting the device, uninstalling and reinstalling it again.
 
RAM memory:
When you upgrade RAM memory, if you have two unmatched RAM cards or a RAM card that is not compatible with your motherboard, then a “Fatal Exception Error” will occur when you start the computer. If you are technically savvy then you may try to fix this by going to the BIOS settings and editing the ‘Wait state’ of RAM or you can replace the cards with the same speed and capacity.
 
Hard Disk Drive:
After using the computer for a few months or years, the hard disk gets fragmented with temporary files, or fragmented files. This will result in slowness of hard disk and may even result in computer crash eventually. You can maintain your harddisk by defragmenting your hard disk frequently and deleting unwanted files.
 
Video Card:
If you see “Fatal OE exceptions and VXD errors” then it is due to the video card. To solve this reduce the video display resolution. You can do so by going to the control panel and display settings. Choose the correct screen resolution to match your monitor and change the color settings to 16 bit or match it with your monitor.
 
Virus:
Most of the computer crash is due to Virus infection in your computer. You should install or enable windows firewall and install an Anti virus application to prevent unwanted virus applications infecting your computer.
 
Printer:
Sometimes you may notice that the computer crashes whenever you try to print something. This is due to low memory buffer in the printer. Therefore when you send a lot of data to the printer or if you have multiple applications open and you print at the same time, this may happen. Unplug the printer from power outlet for 10 minutes and connect back again. Close other programs and try to print again.
 
Software:
If a particular software is not installed properly or is not complete then it may result in a crash when you try to start that software. You have to uninstall such software properly. Otherwise some entries may still be in the registry referring to that software and result in instability of the computer. You can use registry cleaning software to clean your registries frequently.
 
Heat:
Computers have inbuilt fans to cool down the processors. You can control the CPU speed from your BIOS settings. If the speed is set to higher than the normal CPU speed, this may result in overheating of the CPU which will result in Kernel Error.
 
Power Supply:
Use UPS to regulate the power supply to your computer. This will reduce the chances of your computer crashing.