Crash Proof Your
Computer
Part 3
More often than not, today's
software is extremely bloated. Not to keep bagging on Microsoft,
but with each new version of Windows, millions of lines of code
get added. The more lines of code, the more likelihood of bugs.
You can either say that software
companies add more features to
software in order to sell new versions of it, or that we users
keep demanding more. Either way, many of us try to run that bloated
software on the ultra-cheap PCs available today. Well, those
PCs are cheap because the hardware inside them isn't top-quality,
further increasing the chance of crashes.
Furthermore, PC manufacturers
didn't have reliability in mind when they started this wild and
crazy ride that's been dubbed the PC revolution. The goal has
always been to produce PCs that the average person can afford,
not to create super machines that are as stable as mainframe
computers. It's a trade-off. Do you want a PC that crashes now
and again or one that costs many thousands of dollars?
Another reason why PCs crash
is DLL incompatibility. This problem is so prevalent that the
term "DLL Hell" has become commonplace. DLLs (dynamic
link libraries) are small programs that larger programs rely
on in order to accomplish tasks. Often, a DLL is shared among
many applications. Microsoft Word and Excel, for example, would
use the same DLL to send
documents to the printer. When you install new software, it can
potentially overwrite a necessary DLL with an older version bearing
the same name. When an application that's been working fine for
years looks for the DLL that was overwritten and can't find it,
that application is likely to crash.
So do you understand what
we're up against? Given all this, the trick
isn't to crash-proof our PCs, but rather to make them crash less.