911 Part 1

(The following article was created in response to a request on RealTalk for information on what to do when your computer crashes, and is in 5 parts.)

Hi RealTalkers-

I'm sure that you realize that I HAD to chime in on this topic! :-)

I hardly know where to begin on this, but I will say that this will be a fairly lengthy post, so maybe you want to get a cup of coffee to keep you company as you go through this. I'll try to make it worth your while.

Here is the dirty little secret of technology, both hardware and software...It doesn't always work. That's right, you knew that, but the truth is, it doesn't always work. Even the best software and hardware companies have products that just don't work in every possible scenario. They are reasonably sure that the software has gone through a reasonable amount of testing (that's what Beta testers do. They use the software on a variety of hardware and with other software installed to try to find all of the problems known as "bugs"). Some companies draw a line in the sand and say that we will ship software that we are 80% sure of, some say 95%, some say 99.999%. Some programs run to millions of lines of code. I'm not sure that they are ever completely debugged.

Most hardware runs for a good long time once you get past the initial 30 days. It used to be that hardware was "burned-in", or in other words, it was turned on and "exercised" with software that simulated what users would do. This was designed to find the "weakest link" before shipping it out to the consumer. I'm not sure that is being done by the "biggies" anymore. Since things that move or rotate (hard drives, floppies, CD drives) fail quicker than things that don't (Memory, sound cards, etc) it's entirely possible for a hard drive to fail on power up.

Incidentally, the power surge that occurs when starting up a computer is deadly for it. It can actually cause connections to work loose over time. And that is what kills light bulbs. When power comes on, it comes on in a rush and also causes things to heat up. When they heat they expand, when they expand, connections can move or break.

Back to software. In the olden days of about 5 years ago, software developers were a little sloppier in the way that they wrote their software. They often took snippets of programs called Dynamic Link Libraries, or DLL's and rewrote them to suit their application. Nothing wrong here, as long as another application doesn't need the same DLL, and need it in it's original Microsoft format. The problem is that when these programs are installed, they don't check to see if there are other programs depending on existing software, they just go ahead and put their version of the DLL in place. When that happens a failure can result. The familiar "Blue screen of death", the BSOD, as techies like to call it, is a great example of this. When a BSOD occurs you can sometimes get an inkling of what is going on by the cryptic message that is displayed. Sometimes, but not often. Other strange things can happen as well.

So now we come to our intrepid computer user bravely forging on into uncharted territory. The computer crashes, so you call tech support. And you get the horror stories that have been so well reported here.

What can you do? You have to have the computer, and you have to have it running, or you lose out on it's benefits.

I'd like to offer an alternative to blindly picking up the phone and calling tech support. There are some preventative measures that you can take, but you aren't going to like them as you'll have to spend a little money and a little time, but believe me, this is the better way.

First and foremost, cultivate a relationship with a LOCAL techie. This can be your teenager or your neighbor's teenager or somebody from the local junior college, or it can be somebody in business providing tech support. I say this because many simple computer problems get turned in to enormous problems simply due to the fact that the person on the other end of the phone can't see what you see, and they often can't describe to you what they need, or you can't describe it in terms that they understand. But a person on the scene can look at something and often see what you can't. I say cultivate a relationship because you want this person to be on your team. You need the technology person every bit as much as you need your lender, inspectors, title & escrow, attorneys and office help. You just haven't realized that yet.

I'll stop here because I have probably exceeded your good will, as well as the RealTalk character limit. If there is any interest in me continuing this posting, please do let me know. I have almost as much more info to impart as I have presented here already.