WHY YOUR PC KEEPS CRASHING

Prevent and fix – the 12 hidden causes of PC problems that drive you mad

We’ve all experienced the frustration of merrily typing away when suddenly – bang! – your trusty computer locks up and won’t respond no matter what you do. You sit there waiting, hoping and eventually praying for Windows to right itself, but deep down you know it’s only a matter of time before you have to press the power button and risk losing anything you haven’t recently saved.

While a frozen PC is annoying, a computer that crashes often is enough to reduce the best of us to tears. To make matters worse, it can be incredibly difficult to pinpoint the cause of these seemingly random crashes. The usual fixes are to update your drivers, install software updates and download the latest versions of your programs. But if you’ve tried all those and you’re still pulling your hair out, what do you do next?

Here we’ll take you through 12 major causes of an unstable computer and explain how to fix them. We’ll focus on some of the problems caused by the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, as well as glitches that afflict some of the most popular software, including Chrome, Microsoft Office, Skype and more.

Has your PC really crashed?

Before you get started, though, it’s worth checking that your PC has frozen. You can do this by pressing the Caps Lock key. If your keyboard’s Caps Lock indicator light turns on and off, the good news is that your computer hasn’t crashed completely. You should be able to recover it by shutting down a failed program using Task Manager (try pressing Ctrl+alt+delete to access it). Now read on to find out how to turn your computer from an unreliable frustration into a rock-solid machine that you can depend on.