When Windows XP first came out some years ago it was (and is) a huge improvement over the older 98/ME stuff especially with respect to stability and the ability shut down offending apps. It was pretty tough to crash it.
As the years have gone by, across a variety of PCs, I have noticed that XP is more easily locked up by misbehaving apps than it used to be, and it can get the point, especially with browsers and net centric apps where it’s so locked up you have to restart the machine. This virtually never happened when XP was young.
Why is this? You’d think it would be getting more stable over time not less.
I’m not seeing the issue with XP on campus here. We rarely have problems with XP locking up.
My guess would be that there is more spyware around, which may be the cause of problems. We don’t run our computers with users having Admin rights, and they work fine.
Personally, in the couple of years I’ve been familiar with XP, I’ve never really noticed any problems that I don’t suppose could be solved by more RAM, or a faster processor.
I just went two years without a Win XP crash, and added software often. About a month ago a bad program messed up the registry file and I had to reinstall. It was the program that was at fault not Win XP. Win XP has been very stable for me for the last 4 years. The first couple years I did have to reinstall often.
I have noticed the opposite - it runs really smoothly for me these days. Apps do lock up and crash occasionally, but I can’t see a reason to blame XP for that.
I wonder if just the rate of problems seemed low at first, compared to 95/Me, but then as time goes on you forget how much better it was and then just see the problems. Just a perception-type thing, and the problems rate is still about the same.
Is it possible it’s a hardware problem on your machine? If the cooling fan or power supply is starting to get worse, that could cause lock-ups or crashes, and they’d start happening more often as the component got worse.
The last time I regularly (as in, not just once in a blue moon) got Windows XP in general, not an application, to lock up was when I had hardware issues.
I use XP SP 2 at home and XP SP 3 at work. Both are very solid.
How long have you been running on this install of XP? How often do you install/uninstall software? If you’re a heavy installer of new software, games, etc., this might be your problem. All Windows OS’s use a ‘registry’ to control nearly everything. Every time you install a program, a ton of entries get added to the registry, and they don’t always get removed after an uninstall. The registry file is loaded into memory at bootup, and resides in memory at all times. As it gets larger, the system gets slower, and IMHO, more unstable. I would suggest you backup all pertinent data, and completely wipe clean the drive that holds your OS files. Install a fresh copy of XP - or so a ‘system restore’ if you can. And you’ll be shocked how fast things runs. You’ll be floored when you say ‘shutdown’ and the computer is off within 10 seconds. Then, only install the applications that you actually use on a daily basis. Once you’re done, you’ll have a speedier, more stable machine.
Possibly, (and this is just me WAGging my ass off) it might be because newer applications are more resource-intensive than they used to be, asking more of XP than the app’s of old would have.