Error Messages - Don't Worry About the Small Stuff

Don't Worry About the Small Stuff!

There are tons of different computer problems that can crop up when using your machine. Everybody has a different level of technical ability when it comes to computers, so not everybody is bothered by the same things.

Some of the problems and errors I hear about on a regular basis. In one way or another, the most frequent complaints involve the following:

1) Lock ups and reboots. Your computer freezes at the most inappropriate time. No warning, no error message; it just locks up and even the mouse may not respond. Or, perhaps it suddenly reboots in the middle of a program without any indication as to the problem or cause.

2) Slow downs. Your computer used to rip along at lightning speed when you first got it. Now it seems to poke along, taking its time, and making you wait while it performs its duties at what seems to be a snail's pace.

3) Error messages. Messages may appear during startup, or in a little pop-up window, relaying some undecipherable reason or cause for the crash. Sometimes, you can just close the window, or bypass the error message and continue on with your work. Other times, you may not be so lucky.

However they manifest themselves, most people tend to worry way too much about them. I've had people tell me:

"I was working in Excel about two weeks ago and suddenly it just froze up on me. I couldn't use the mouse, I couldn't do anything except restart my computer. I lost all my work that I hadn't saved. It's been working since, but I don't know why it did that! I've got lots of room left on my hard drive, and 32Mb of memory should be sufficient!"

The most unusual thing I heard here, is that he hasn't had another error on his computer for two whole weeks! I see errors, of some sort or another, on my computers 4 or 5 times a week.

Some things may not even be recognized as errors by some users. Errors are a fact of cyber-life. They're going to happen. There are no perfect systems, configurations or applications.

There are many things you can do to help reduce the number of problems your computer has (the topic for upcoming NewsLetters), but you're not going to get rid of them completely!

So what did happen in the above example? ...Who Knows! Maybe he had several large programs open at the same time and resources had been depleted. Maybe he clicked on a function in Excel that required a file that was already in use by another program. Perhaps another device made a request at the same time as he clicked his mouse, resulting in a hardware conflict that froze up the machine. Or, perhaps the function he was trying to access isn't supported by that particular CPU when a certain video adapter is installed.
etc., etc., etc.

There could be hundreds of reasons. The thing to remember, however, is that it only happened once. Don't worry about it. Learn from it and start saving your work on a more regular basis.

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