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Does your computer have an allergy?
By Candace Richey
We’ve all been there. Our computer is running along real well, few crashes, and then we add the long-desired piece of software. All of a sudden our computers act like aliens, every button you push ends in those annoying “fatal error” messages, or worse, it just locks up.
Don’t panic, your computer just has an allergy.
Allergy, you ask? Well, you’ve heard of viruses, infecting your computer and obtained mostly from the internet or pirated software. But you’ve never heard of an allergy?
An allergic reaction occurs when you load a new piece of software (or hardware, camera card readers are notorious), and for some reason or another, your computer doesn’t like it. Now what do you do?
First, it depends upon what happened immediately prior to adding whatever you added. If you added only one program or piece of equipment, it is most likely the culprit. But, if you added two, three or more prior to testing any of them out, like I sometimes do, the procedure is similar to a baby with food allergies. You just remove one at a time until the system begins to work properly.
In testing the newest software available on the market, there are many days when three, four or more packages come in, and we begin adding them to our system to test out. It is always a good idea to add only one at a time, test that one and your other software to make sure that you are operating properly. If anything at all happens that is not normal, remove the software and see if it cures the problem. If it does, call the software vendor and let them know what happened. Usually they will be able to talk you through the problem, and eliminate it. However, if it cannot be corrected due to software you need conflicting with the new program, you’ll have to make a choice of which you want to keep.
If after removing the new software, your problem persists, it probably isn’t an allergy after all. It could be just one of those bugs that occasionally drive you crazy. In those cases, a utility program such as First Aid for Windows could help.
Allergies are possible on any system, even the most up to date and highly configured. You can have 8 gigs of ram, a 2 tb hard drive with 1.5 tb free, and still this sort of thing can happen. As with all things computer related, patience and persistence will win out.
For Vista users, this is an even more prevalent problem. Some software just does not like Vista, and while the companies can usually provide some solutions, intermittent crashing can still be experienced. We can’t wait until Windows 7 (in October 2009) comes out, hopefully they’ll fix the buggies from Vista.
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