when a computer freezes, what is actually happening to the system and components?
In: Engineering
TL;DR: These days, is usually the computer detecting some internal glitch and shutting itself down rather than risk worse.
On a modern computer, it’s usually that the system has detected something wrong and shuts itself down to prevent data corruption or security risks. That’s the windows blue screen of death. Imagine a play rehearsal where somebody flubs a line and the director face palms and says “ok everyone, from the top.”
Systems are pretty well protected from software flaws these days, but there are some components that’s hard to do for. Problems in the deep reptile brain parts of system software can still cause freezes. That’s the software that directly works with hardware.
Electrical problems can cause freezes. There’s an amazing number of things working in very close synchronization inside a computer, and if something glitches that it can get to the digital equivalent of gears grinding. But at a trillion RPM. So it just stops instead.
Finally, you can have it get so slow it feels frozen. Like people, switching attention is one of the hardest things for computers. It can take a computer milliseconds to go from one task to another! So, if a few things get stuck interrupting each other, the computer can show to a crawl. Computers manage resources by moving things around internally, which is great, but as the demands start to exceed resources, they’ll spend more and more time juggling, eventually entering one-armed wallpaper hanger territory.
Latest Answers