Aqua-Soft Forumsvirusees, hackers, programs, incapadibility? if i were to make my windows xp never crash, what should i do?
sorry i forgot to tagg the post. how? 
What Causes Computers To Crash?
Tep, those are what causes the crashes. If you never want Windows XP to crash, don't use it. Seriously, that is the only way. If you want to minimise crashing, don't do any modding. And install the fewest applications a possible, because those installers can modify system files, and possibly making them less stable. Use a hardware firewall instead of a software firewall.
You tage a thread by just using text. "[help]". But since you already posted the thread, you can't change the thread title. You can modify your post, but you can't modify the title.
Best way to minimise this it to buy good hardware. Ive NEVER had a crash that wasnt caused by either me overclocking too much or modding systemfiles and fubaring it all up.
I think this is what you are looking for 
serisouly though...
You just have to be careful about what you install and what programs you use.... like wizard said basically. Definilety have a good virus scanner running always and watch who you receive emails from... not much else you can do.
haha. true. thanks for the help. hardware can cause crashes eh? oh yea. is it possible to instal mac osx 10.3 on my pc hardware and having that solve all my problems of crashing?
really there is no way? no good software or hardware that prevents it?
Originally posted by steelfist@Aug 31 2004, 03:32 PMhaha. true. thanks for the help. hardware can cause crashes eh? oh yea. is it possible to instal mac osx 10.3 on my pc hardware and having that solve all my problems of crashing?
really there is no way? no good software or hardware that prevents it?
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you can try pearpc.. but it has to be on windows :6 and you have to own OS X 10.x
The only sureshot way to prevent crashes is to buy good APIC compliant hardware, not mod your PC to look like other sh!t, disable crap services from your system like Themes, Fast User Switching, Messenger etc. and install a bare minimum of applications. I've had XP running on my system without a crash for 2 years at a stretch.
Originally posted by deathmedic3rd@Aug 31 2004, 10:42 AMyou can try pearpc.. but it has to be on windows :6 and you have to own OS X 10.x
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PearPC runs on Linux. 
As per the original question, the answer is: All of the Above. Even Macs can crash. Run an AV/Firewall, keep all your software up to date, don't mess with system files, run stable software, etc, etc. Even if you did do all of that, there could be hardware problems, or something else. Welcome to the wonderful world of computing. I've even had my calculator crash.
Originally posted by ifido@Aug 31 2004, 08:09 AMYou cant. Get a mac.
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apparently you've never used Quark on a mac.
You'd say differently
Funny, my system has been running WinXP for 15months now without a single crash, burp or hiccup. Completely modded XPC Shuttle SFF thats been upgraded at least 4 times since I built this system.
There are certain practices you need to follow when working with any computer, or modding any computer, too long to list here, that come from years of experience.
Its like my wife and spyware/ viruses/ spam - she has horrible practices of giving out her email out wherever. She gets tons of junk mail, viruses, and has to run two seperate spyware apps. The only virus Ive had was over a year ago, and I NEVER get spam or spyware. Its all in the guidelines you set for your computer use. Sloppy interaction leads to a sloppy system, regardless of platform.
If you have nothing of mild intelligence to add to this thread, dont add anything.
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The Pointless Posts Have Been Removed
// Seph
Obviously, there are particular programs that will be more likely to cause problems. For some programs, this is because they aren't designed that well. For others, e.g., viruses, causing performance problems (or actually crashing a computer/necessitating a reboot) is the goal.
But there are also computing habits that decrease/increase the likelihood that a performance problem will be encountered. Obviously, leaving an excessive number of programs running, opening random shady programs, etc. etc., will increase the odds.
But I think a lot of people gloss over what you can do to maintain the state of, well, I'm speaking particularly about Windows; it pains me when someone complains that there computer is slow, is old, sucks, etc. Most of the time they have a million things they don't need running in the first place, things that slow down the computer and at the same time make it more likely that the computer's performance will continue to degrade or that it will crash. Spyware, useless crap like the helper programs QuickTime and RealOne :rant: seem to reinsert into your startup sequence if you even think "QuickTime" or "RealOne" in your mind.
But, back to the real point of what I'm trying to say, a lot of people will observe that their computer is slow, get pissed off, and restart it. Or they'll just let their computers crash, and get even more pissed off.
But my computer has gotten to the point where I've absolutely had to reboot it... maybe once or twice since I got it a year ago. And those were because of illegitimate programs which, for some reason, Internet Explorer seemed to think deserved full ActiveX permissions. Suffice it to say, I've had enough with Internet Explorer and ridiculous security setting issues.
Anyway, my computer doesn't crash because XP is not Windows 98. And by that I mean, at least from what I've observed, a program cannot seem to just run away with system memory and resources until you can't even access the task manager anymore. I have never not been able to get to the task manager in XP. And so when my computer appears to be getting slow, I open the task manager, and there is always some single program that has become unstable and is driving up CPU usage to 100%. So I figure out what the program is, and kill it.
It's that simple. Making sure I don't have viruses/spyware/those freaking disgusting QuickTime/RealOne pieces of garbage, and killing the occasional unstable program. That's all it takes. If your computer is crashing, then you're not doing those, or you have a hardware problem. Windows computers do not just ... inexplicably crash all the time because they're inferior or old or slow. They crash because people let them.
For me, except when explorer feels like crashing every once in a while, I havent had any problems. I do know how to keep my system safe (if I was idling here on AS and one of you pinged me, it would be like I dont exist, in theory) and I have some good hardware firewalls (a nice little linux based one called a netwinder and a linksys router) plus I am not an idiot about how computers, networks and the internet work.
is avg and adaware se good enough to protech my computer? also, what part of the hardware makes it unstable? cpu? graphics card? motherboard? case!?!?!?!
why is mac more stable in some sense? is it because all the programs are directly approved by apple, or something like that?
Compared to windows 2000 and XP, they're not much more stable. I only had XP crash once in two years with no reformats. Apps crashed a lot, but never the OS. Apparently macs have better memory management due to the Darwin core. Don't quote me on that though...
Programs that have cross-platform products usually have the same crashes, they just compile it with the libraries that it needs for the apporopriate platform, but the code is the same.
Application stability themselves are based on the coding. Errors in coding result in a crash. Such as a never ending loop, or just a typo or something.
Same with the Operating System. Any holes in the coding will result in a crash. Windows 9x/ME was bad because a program crash could result in a Windows crash. But it was fixed in the NT OS (NT4, 2000 Pro, XP), don't know exactly how, something that Macintosh and *nix already done.
Originally posted by wizard@Sep 1 2004, 05:09 PM[...]it was fixed in the NT OS (NT4, 2000 Pro, XP), don't know exactly how, something that Macintosh and *nix already done.
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It was fixed by making applications have their own memory space, and ensuring that applications couldn't interfere with one another's memory space (or not interfere if they didn't have permissions), as I recall.
As for Macintosh and *nix having already done it, Macintosh hadn't done it by the time it was done in NT - NT had it back in the mid-90s on NT 3 and 4, whereas Mac OS only had protected memory space, if memory serves, from OS X.
To add to what Stevie said:
The term is 'preemptive multitasking' vs. 'collaborative multitasking'
Windows 3.1 and Mac OS before OS X had the collaborative flavor.
It means that when you run multiple programs at once (and the various
services of the operating system) the collaborative is like handing
the staff manually form one app to another, like in olympic Relay Run.
A badly programmed app could keep the staff forever, hence drain other
programs and the OS's responsiveness and its crash could kill the relay
run altogether.
In the preemptive one, the processor itself halts and starts programs, based
on some process descriptor tables the operating system provides.
Win95/98/SE/ME are a mixed mode of the above: 32-bit Apps would benefit
from real 'preemptive' multitasking, while large parts of the OS would, for the
reason of better compatibility to 16-bits, inherit and share the 'collaborative'
model with its aforesaid shortcomings. Until Mac OS X, all Apples weren't capable
of real multitasking since the 68x00 processors didn't have hardware support
for multitasking; PPCs had that feature but to use it, you had to run Linux...
'Ring 0' vs. 'user mode'.
Ever since the 80386, wintel PCs had the capability to protect one process from
another by so called address descriptor tables and this support of assigning
valid read/write readonly and handsoff memory pages (aka segments) has been
burnt into the silicium. However coders were so sick of segmented memory
architecture (64K-limit), that they declared all segments to be of 4 GB which
gave an impression of flat memory access, which is actually still virtual here.
That's actually why access violations and buffer overruns still can occur - the
code that gets executed is still inside a giant read/write segment because some
crackheads at Intel decided to extend the segmented memory access from
16- to 32 bits and some coder at MS was sick of it. Help is at hand: (SP2)
You can now mark memory pages as code/read-only on a more rigid level,
but its still all software and the protective features of wintel PC hardware
still remains unused. Today, the operating system drivers run on ring 0, all user
mode apps run on ring 1, ignoring the fact that 15 more levels of security would
be available. When an app accesses memory that doesn't belong to it, a ring 0
event handler captures tha access violation and tells some user mode pgm to
display the ugly message box you all have seen. If a ring 0 pgm goes astray in
the same way, there'll only be a BSOD handler waiting.
The main problem is that an operating system driver would be creeping slow if
it ran on ring x - so MS is clearly allowing vulnerability for speed.
This may change some time for MS and other OS makers - they all do the same
allowance, because these days are still the neolithics of computer age - some
primitives in furs have learned to bang two flintstones together and have some
fire, but there's still a busload of chemistry and physics to learn - all this coding
stuff is no exact science at all and you can't even prove that a program halts
or runs forever with scientific methods. Wait until the stone age has passed,
deep freeze until the antique became history and wake up about end of middle
age to see a reliable computer.
Awesome post, herd...
Reminds me of all the crap I learnt in my computer architecture courses at uni