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, 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 the software. If you added only one program, 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 many of 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 1 gig of ram, a 120 gig hard drive with 75 gigs free, and still this sort of thing can happen. As with all things computer related, patience and persistence will win out.