Startup Issues at hand

How many of you have plopped down at your desk and turned on your PC only to find there are errors preventing it from starting up as it normally would? That is always so irritating to me. Everything was just fine when I shut this baby down last night and now some gremlins have had their way inside while I slept. lol While they may look frightening in first light, most are relatively simple to fix.

Know your limits though! If it looks way too complicated check around for some pricing guides and call local shops to see what your particular problem might run. Sometimes you can fix it yourself and for allot cheaper than taking it in somewhere or calling someone to come fix it for you. Some techie fixes are just not cost effective and your better off saving your money and picking up a new machine.

Some common problems are caused by RAM going bad, a hard drive going bad or a program loading on startup that is hanging everything else up. Once you boot up your machine, watch the lower right hand corner system tray and see how many programs load. These autoloaders can wreak havoc and slow your PC down considerably. You really should turn most of those things off, and only open them when YOU choose to open them. To see which programs are autoloading, and stop them from starting with your PC startup go to START>RUN then type in msconfig. In the pane on the right you will see several entries with check marks beside them. Simply un-check all items you do not want running at start up and select OK. Make sure you DO NOT un-check your Anti-virus software. You will be prompted to restart the machine. When you start up you will see a message stating you are using selective start up. Just choose *do not show this message again*. This should help with any slow startup issues you may have been having.

Stay tuned as I will add to this particular thread often with more tips on startup issues.

Maintenance programs?

Is anyone out there using any maintenance programs to keep their Windows running smoothly? Ive been seeing a program called Bug Doctor and thought I might give it a try to see if it is all its cracked up to be. If so then I can recommend it to you folks. I also noticed they have free technical support with your license to Bug Doctor software as well. How can you go wrong there? Im going to order it this evening and I will check back in a few days with you and let you know how it goes. *fingers crossed!* If there is a fix all maintenance program that keeps me from having to do my defrags and all that stuff manually I think it will be great and I will definitely be recommending the Bug Doctor to all of my friends!

If anyone wants to check out Bug Doctor for themselves take a look at it at the bug doctor website. They even guarantee to fix any computer problems you have during your membership. 

Even if the software doesn’t fix your problems their support staff will, and I don’t know of anybody else who does that.

What is a bug?

I found this article on wikipedia and thought it would be super useful for everyone to read. I hope it helps you in some small way.  This is not the article in is entirety, just a few excerpts that I found useful. You can view the entire article at wilipedia.org.

A software bug (or just “bug”) is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect result). Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program’s source code or its design, and a few are caused by compilers producing incorrect code. A program that contains a large number of bugs, and/or bugs that seriously interfere with its functionality, is said to be buggy. Reports detailing bugs in a program are commonly known as bug reports, fault reports, problem reports, trouble reports, change requests, and so forth.

Bugs can have a wide variety of effects, with varying levels of inconvenience to the user of the program. Some bugs have only a subtle effect on the program’s functionality, and may thus lie undetected for a long time. More serious bugs may cause the program to crash or freeze leading to a denial of service. Others qualify as security bugs and might for example enable a malicious user to bypass access controls in order to obtain unauthorized privileges.

The results of bugs may be extremely serious. A bug in the code controlling the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine was directly responsible for some patient deaths in the 1980s. In 1996, the European Space Agency’s US$1 billion prototype Ariane 5Chinook crashed into the Mull of Kintyre, killing 29. This was initially dismissed as pilot error, but an investigation by Computer Weekly uncovered sufficient evidence to convince a House of LordsFADEC. rocket was destroyed less than a minute after launch, due to a bug in the on-board guidance computer program. In June 1994, a Royal Air Force inquiry that it may have been caused by a software bug in the aircraft’s

 

It is common practice for software to be released with known bugs that are considered non-critical. While software products contain an unknown number of unknown bugs when shipped, measurements during the testing may provide a statistically reliable estimate of the number of likely bugs remaining. Most big software projects maintain a list of “known bugs”. This list inform users about bugs that are not fixed in the current release, or not fixed at all, and often a workaround is offered additionally.

There are various reasons for such a list:

• The developers often don’t have time to fix all non-severe bugs.
• The bug could be fixed in a new version or patch that is not yet released.
• The changes to the code required to fix the bug would be large, and would bring with them the chance of introducing other bugs into the system.

Given the above, it is often considered impossible to write completely bug-free software of any real complexity. So bugs are categorized by severity, and low-severity non-critical bugs are tolerated, as they do not impact the proper operation of the system, for the majority of users. NASA’s SATC managed to reduce number of errors to fewer than 0.1 per 1000 lines of code (SLOC) but this was not felt to be feasible for any real world projects.

Security vulnerabilities

Malicious software may attempt to exploit known vulnerabilities in a system – which may or may not be bugs. Viruses are not bugs in themselves – they are typically programs that are doing precisely what they were designed to do. However, viruses are occasionally referred to as such in the popular press.

Common types of computer bugs

• Divide by zero
• NULL pointer dereference
• Infinite loops
• Arithmetic overflow or underflow
• Exceeding array bounds
• Using an uninitialized variable
• Accessing memory not owned (Access violation)
• Memory leak or Handle leak
• Stack overflow or underflow
• Buffer overflow
• Deadlock
• Off by one error
• Race condition
• Loss of precision in type conversion