Monday 6 April 2015

Why do Application Programs ‘Fall Over’?

If you are using an application (sometimes still called a ‘program’) then from time to time it may apparently ‘go wrong’.

If the problem is sufficiently serious it may cease working altogether (called colloquially ‘falling over’) and need to be recovered by your operating system, such as windows etc.

Unfortunately, there are far too many reasons behind a program malfunction to list here. They could, quite literally, number thousands.

However, here are a few of the more commonly encountered ones we’ve seen and fixed at Server Sentry, sometimes as part of our data recovery solutions service.

• Errors in the program code itself. These are those old-fashioned traditional ‘bugs’ that may have been accidentally encoded into the program by the original programmer. Sometimes they can’t be fixed other than by reporting the program to the company that produced it.

• Incompatibility between the program and its host operating system. For example, some applications may function perfectly under Windows 7 but not Windows 8.

• An incompatibility between the program and other programs it interacts with. This is similar to the above point but may involve other application programs on your system rather than the operating system.

• Using the program outside of its design parameters. This usually arises when someone is trying to get the program to do something that the original designers didn’t think of and therefore didn’t build in support for. A variation on the theme is, for example, putting far more data into a program than it was intended to handle, so its capacity becomes an issue.

• Human error. This covers a surprisingly large number of apparent problems and arises when someone is trying to do something with the software incorrectly. Of course, arguably no program should ever fall over because somebody pushed the wrong button but it can happen!

Diagnosing and then fixing the problem is a specialist task and it’s one that we are proud to say we excel at.

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