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   Lydia Conwell (lydiaconwell@todon.nl)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jun-2026 05:47:06 JST Lydia Conwell

   You know computers? ...

   And I might regret asking this ...

   What actually happens when a computer crashes?

   If you can tell me in simpleton terms, that would be good, but what actually happens to make the computer go plop plop?

   #Computers #AskFedi #Computing

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     Steve's Place (steter@mastodon.stevesworld.co)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jun-2026 05:47:05 JST Steve's Place

     in reply to

     @lydiaconwell There are crashes that happen because a privileged area of memory was accessed. Some crashes happen because the operating system is unresponsive, and something called a "watchdog timer" fires. Others happen when boot disks get too full, and all sorts of bad things are going on. And there are always programs capable of causing them because of bugs, misconfiguration, or the phase of the Moon. This is not a complete list, by any means. PCs are full of timing requirements which can, if a chip is hot and becoming sluggish, create all sorts of problems, including crashes. There are sensors monitoring the temperatures of key components. If they get too hot, the system usually shuts off. There are many events in any computer fully capable of crashing it. The miracle is that they work at all, lol.

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     Lydia Conwell (lydiaconwell@todon.nl)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jun-2026 05:58:40 JST Lydia Conwell

     in reply to

     • Steve's Place

     @steter Thanks. I'm just thinking about how you could defeat a cyborg because it's too warm a day, or they have to process too many things at the same time!

     Steve's Place repeated this.
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     Stefan Ihringer (compfu@mograph.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jun-2026 06:51:52 JST Stefan Ihringer

     in reply to

     • Steve's Place

     @lydiaconwell @steter "too many things at the same time" is a good thought! In a way, multi-tasking on a computer is a mirage. It's just running multiple programs in tiny steps, one at a time. When the computer comes around to continue with a task it interrupted a millisecond ago it expects memory and variables to be "as it left it". If that is not true it might wait for a thing to happen that is now be impossible and never complete its task. That might look like the program froze.