Like the rest of you who use your computers for several hours every day, I sometimes have computer problems. It seems that when I do have one of these problems, that nine times out of ten it is an extremely bad problem. I have my computer protected as best as I can against viruses. I have PC Tools Spyware Doctor installed along with Threatfire. Experts claim that this is the best protection you can have against viruses and spyware and it seems to have worked very well for me. My main problems seem to come from Windows itself. I am running Windows XP Home right now, because I have refused to use Vista. Vista uses more memory, doesn't run some of my software and doesn't run all of my hardware. Not only that, it seems to crash more then Windows XP. My daughter has it on her laptop and gets the blue screen of death at least once a day.

I have no problems with my tv, stove, refrigerator and my car. Why do I have so many problems with my computer?

The other day I was happily typing out an article into the Open Office writer and BAM, without warning the operating system failed and would not reload. I had never seen this happen before and was forced to reload the operating system using the last known good configuration option in dos. This got Windows up and running again, but some programs were lost and I had to reload them. This cost me several hours, but at least I didn't have to redo everything. I never found out what the cause was. I looked in the event log in the Administrative tools section, but it didn't show anything for that date. Trying to keep your train of thought for an article when this happens is quite maddening. This was not the first time I had a monumental crash on a computer, it was just another in a long line of crashes that cost me time and sometimes even money.

Since I have the virus and spyware problem pretty much under control, I will not mention any of the crashes caused by this kind of stuff in the past. I can't even say that Windows XP, Millennium, and Windows 98 were the only operating systems that I have experienced devastating crashes on. I used to use Amiga computers exclusively and as great as they were in their day, they also crashed from time to time, but that was over 20 years ago, you would have expected that things would have progressed to the point where these types of crashes are a thing of the past. There is something called protected memory. Sometimes it is referred to as a sandbox. Programs can safely be run in a sandbox and if anything happens while they are running, it doesn't affect anything else on the computer. It has been a mystery to me why such a system could not be instituted in Windows. Another program safety measure is a jail. A jail is a set of limits imposed on software by the computer's operating system. This prevents programs from doing things like using too much memory, among other things.

Sandboxes are used quite often and the term when they are used is called sandboxing. If a sandbox is so effective when testing dangerous programs, why has it been ignored by Microsoft? This feature could have saved me years of grief. There is a third method that is sometimes used and that is where programs are given parameters that they can only run in by tokens that are set up for each program. This prevents the software from performing some illegal action that would cause a crash in the first place. I used a small sandbox once on a computer, but it wasn't built in. The fact that you could only run some programs that didn't install directly into the operating system and registry limited it's usefulness. It was quite helpful with the programs that did run in it.

While I don't experience as many crashes as I did with Windows 98 and Windows Millennium, I still get hit at least 1.5 – 2 times a year with the disastrous kind. What I mean by that is it is the kind of failure of Windows where I have to reinstall Windows XP and then reinstall every program back on the machine. This is a true 2 to 3 day job, depending on how many hours I am able to apply to this project. Some might say, it is my fault for not having things backed up. Well I do have every piece of software backed up, but it has to be reinstalled. I have never used a backup program that I was fully satisfied with. I remember when I was using Rollback Rx. I was quite happy with it until I had a failure and tried to reinstall everything and Rollback Rx wouldn't work from dos, where it was supposed to be able to use a snapshot to set the system back to the state it was in before the crash. By the way I had contacted the company twice on that particular issue and they never answered my problem. This was not the first time that a backup program had let me down. One time I spend hours copying everything to CDs. I had over 60 of them. They were created by a backup program. When I had a crash that wouldn't allow me to load Windows anymore I pulled out my trusty backups and tried to reinstall them. Guess what? Nothing worked. Boy was I frustrated that day. I wasted over a pack of CDs, not to mention hours of my time creating the backups and to no avail.

Then there was the backup that I made that seemed to work. When the big crash came it seemed to be installing correctly, but something happened and I noticed that that it began to state that I only had 69 hours left to completion. Well it didn't take a genius to know that something was wrong. I let it run for a couple of more hours to see if things worked out, but in the end I found out that it had no intention of reinstalling my data or the operating system.

Over the years I have also seen some very strange things happen when my computer was running. I remember seeing all my icons disappear. This still happens once in a blue moon, but upon resetting the computer they usually come back, but not always in the places that I had placed them. I have also seen programs disappear. This is much less frequent and has only happened a couple of times. I would love to know the reason for that. Then there is the clipboard. This is the place that you can copy to and from on the computer. What is really aggravating is when you copy some lengthy text there and when you try and paste it to a different document, you get trash or something else. Various problems where my devices cease to be recognized have happened with all the different versions of windows that I have used. Not only do they happen, but they usually happen at the worst possible time. One of the worst things that can happen besides a crash where you have to reinstall everything, is when you want to print something and the printer goes off line at the same time the operating system won't let you save what you wrote. Because of this type of problem, I have gotten myself into the habit of saving what I write often so that if I lose it, I will only lose a small part of the article.

All in all, Windows is a very aggravating operating system and I can't wait for the day when it has some real competition. No one wants to take this giant on. The smaller companies are afraid that they will just get bought up if they annoy Microsoft and even Apple with their supposed better operating system has not tried to compete. Let's hope that someone will take up the challenge, even if it is a foreign company that manages to come out with something better.