[question] are anticrash programs crap?

in some threads i have heard that anticrash programs do more harm to your computer than they prevent, and i had some crappy experiences too.

i tried pc bodygaurd > power pc and after i installed it, do you know what's the first thing that crashed?

you guessed it. the program itself. gosh it can save others other than itself. i'm quite curious about these companies claiming that they can prevent "98%" of crashes, though even after i installed that program, the next thing that happened was the computer freezing and thank god that microsoft word can backup word documents.

what do you guys think? i love stability and that's why i hate microsoft.

#244374

yep they are all crap

all pcs dont accept the same tweaking configuration, so best way is to tweak yourself and see what works for you, my pc is tweaked and ive never experienced any stability issues

dont hate microsoft!

#244474

xp is pretty stable for me. i maintain it frequently, and i take care of it. i've never had a stability problem, and i'm overclocked by a several hundred mhz.

those programs don't do anything. you're better off tweaking and maintaining your system on your own.

#244676

anyone ever use norton crashguard... man, did that app suck, crashed my 95 machine more than anything else.

#244684

anyone ever use norton crashguard... man, did that app suck, crashed my 95 machine more than anything else.

Something made 95 crash MORE OFTEN?!? Didn't even know that was possible... :slant:

#244696

95 ? 95 was a really cool little OS man I have it and it NEVER crashes and Ive got it on an old 486 laptop with

16 MB ram lol. Its actually pretty fast to.

#244868

I agree with Hobbes, 95 with 96 MB of RAM ran quite well

#245385

Windows 95 OSR 2 was actualy very stable.

But to answer the question, I haven't seen any crash guard programs that actualy prevented anything from crashing. If a program is written like crap, it's gonna crash regardless of what you do to prevent it.

Except of course not running the program in the first place.

Anyway... a well maintained and patched OS should (heavy emphasis on should), run without issue. It's when you introduce poorly written applications that don't use proper coding standards is when stuff starts to break.

#245390

Windows 95 OSR 2 was actualy very stable.

But to answer the question, I haven't seen any crash guard programs that actualy prevented anything from crashing. If a program is written like crap, it's gonna crash regardless of what you do to prevent it.

Except of course not running the program in the first place.

Anyway... a well maintained and patched OS should (heavy emphasis on should), run without issue. It's when you introduce poorly written applications that don't use proper coding standards is when stuff starts to break.

its funny how something so stable turned into windows 98 and become known as byfar the worst os ever.... thats why everyone whould get an apple, i mean their cheetah is more stable the win xp

#245412

windows me was the worst OS ever...

#245436

yes... they are crap

#245572

As for the original question:

In the 1930ies a smart guy called Goedel coined a theorem which basically says that no (math) system can describe itself completely enough. A system can hence only describe or predict smaller systems.

It can be shown that this or that smaller app won't crash in a million years, but that does not guarantee that it will keep on running for billions of years, because the final proof of its runnability is, per se, not provable.

What can we deduce here?

An application that can predict the most basic windows crashes needs to be bigger than entire windows itself.

An application that tweaks the system to the desired effect of less crashes likely introduces more trouble than it is worth it. (Kinda entropic effect)

The less complex a system is, the less it crashes. The more software you introduce to your system, the more you peck it out of its balance.

'95 would run on a 16 MHz 386 with 8 MB RAM. Then, things got worse. They always do.

But it does not pay to run old software on modern hardware - a sample: In the 486 years, a very popular Pascal compiler employed for DOS games would do amazing things with accurate hi-res timers. Today, these applications would utterly fail on every PC that has more than 200 MHz because at this speed, from the compilers point of view, no measurable time elapsed between two calls and the program would branch to a series of instructions that were never intended back in '91.

#245602