A Glance into Stability Issues
Stability issues are issues that cause you frustration while operating your computer. These symptoms may occur over a period of time and reflect on the stability of your PC:
PC suddenly reboots
Your computer is booting up and starting to work correctly, but on occasion it reboots without warning and with no error message whatsoever.
PC crashes with a blue screen
(a.k.a "stop error")
The error screen displayed by the Microsoft WinOS systems upon encountering a critical error that causes the system to "crash."
PC Freezes
Your PC seizes hard. No mouse or keyboard response, and a reboot is necessary.
A specific program failure
A specific program stopped working, started crashing, cannot be run/installed (or uninstalled) or freezes in certain situations.
What Causes Stability Issues
There are 3 main causes of PC stability issues:
Unstable WinOS Operating system
This stability issue is, unfortunately, one of the most difficult of all issues to troubleshoot on a PC. The reason is twofold: first, this issue is usually intermittent, and therefore hard to pin down to any particular cause, and second, there are a wide variety of factors involved and so many variations of WinOS configurations that every PC is a different story.
Operating system becomes unstable as a result of various cases:
- Damage caused by previous virus infection (most common): Your PC may have been infected by viruses in the past and you most probably caught the virus with a good antivirus software and terminated/quarantined it. The fact is, in most cases, this is not enough to combat the stability issue you're having. Viruses leave behind residual damage in files they infect that remain on your PC even after the virus is gone.
Read more on our blog - Damage related to WinOS updates - shutting down or restarting your PC during a WinOS update & downloading erroneous WinOS updates.
See example here - Damage related to WinOS registry keys - registry keys are where WinOS stores all kind of configuration settings. Running unreliable registry cleaners or trying to edit these keys manually without professional knowledge may cause unexpected behaviors in the form of PC stability issues that will later on be very hard to track and fix.
Read more about registry keys
Unstable "3rd party" Applications
Third-party applications are those downloaded and installed, for example, from websites and installation CD's.
3rd party applications become unstable due to:
- Broken/incomplete program installations.
- Usage of badly coded, and/or buggy programs - In most cases these are programs that not designed well enough to work with other programs or not tested thoroughly.
- Usage of outdated programs - programs that were built for a certain WinOS version but installed on a newer one.
Unstable Hardware
Hardware instability is something that in most cases requires paying a costly visit to a PC technician.
Almost every hardware component in your PC may one day get worn out and malfunction, and in most cases this results in spontaneous PC reboots and freezes.
What stability issues can Reimage fix?
Built-in WinOS applications:
These are applications on your PC that are strongly related and heavily integrated into your WinOS operating system. Reimage has all of the necessary components (files and registry keys) in its spare parts server to fix them.
Third party applications:
Third party applications are not strongly integrated into your WinOS operating system. They can include any application you've ever installed on your computer. In most cases, fixing the WinOS components around these applications will also fix the application itself. On the other hand, Reimage cannot fix defects that exist in third-party software. Reimage simply does not have these spare parts in the repository.
Hardware and other issues:
Other issues may be hardware related or have nothing to do with the functionality of your WinOS operating system. Reimage can't repair these issues - it cannot perform actions that require physical access to your PC.
How does Reimage measure PC stability?
When applications crash, they leave a record in the WinOS event log. The event log counts when and how frequently the crash happened. It also records each time there was a crash in the operating system and stores it in "dump files". A Reimage scan utilizes a special capability to analyze the events log and weigh PC stability severity accordingly.
Reimage compares the amount of events, their severity and frequency to worldwide statistics, gathered from millions of other PC's Reimage has scanned. It considers the profile of a healthy PC as a reference and calculates a stability level based on that reference.
In certain situations, you may be aware of a PC stability issue but the Reimage preliminary scan glossed over it (or didn't report it at all). This usually happens with 'PC freeze', where WinOS can't log the issue and so the Reimage program is not aware of its existence.
Note: This doesn't mean that your Reimage repair will be unsuccessful! The Reimage repair may not be reporting specific symptoms but will treat the operating system as a whole and replace damaged files, regardless of the stability level declared.
How far back does Reimage analyze my PC for stability calculation?
If you've not done a Reimage repair yet:
The program analyzes PC stability for the past 4 months or since your OS was installed (whichever is most recent).
If you've already done a Reimage repair:
The program analyzes your PC’s stability beginning from the most recent repair and that's why you'll see 100% stability right after performing a repair.
Tip: Run the scan once a month or so to see if your PC's stability level has degraded, in which case you may need to run a repair.