when a computer freezes, what is actually happening to the system and components?
In: Engineering
There are a lot of reasons for a computer to freeze, but ultimately it means that it has stopped responding to input or doing much if any processing.
This can be because it’s stuck in a loop. Consider this simplified version of an operating system. The computer does the following steps in order:
1. Check input from mouse, keyboard, etc.
2. Act on that input (do whatever a click does, or a keypress)
3. Check for important system requests, like “close a program” if the user clicked exit or “connect to wi-fi” if a wi-fi signal is in range
4. Do whatever those system requests requested
5. Go back to step 3 and check if the system request is still there
6. Go back to step 1 and start everything over
If step 4 somehow fails – you clicked exit but the program doesn’t want to stop yet – then the computer will just perform steps 3, 4 and 5 over and over and you will never get back to step 1 and the computer won’t be able to respond to your inputs.
Real-life computers don’t hit this specific issue, but it’s a simplified version of how they can get stuck due to software issues.
Hardware can cause this as well. Your computer might have an instruction that says “Save this number to RAM and wait for confirmation that it is saved.” If your RAM is faulty, it will never get the confirmation and remain stuck. If your CPU overheats, it will slow down and may have issues correctly performing operations, resulting in it getting stuck.
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