Why do computers fail

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Its 2011 for crying out loud

"Fail" is extremely vague. Fail at what?

They dont. They can only do as their asked. Human error is the only problem a computer can have.

i've always have nothing but balky frustration with microsoft products. i've known people who were mac users who had nothing but good feelings for their puters, which never crashed on them. every PC running windows i've had, has crashed/locked up on me at least once per session. windows 7 is the absolute worst at this. what microsoft never admits, is that w7 will run properly ONLY with a multithreading CPU such as the latest generation pentium or AMD equivalent, and at least 4 gigs of the highest speed RAM. anything less, like my lowly celeron with <2G slow ram, is guaranteed to be balky at best. i have to type this in a word processor then copy/paste it into WP because [from what i've been able to figure out] the background attacks by malware/viruses are so powerful that it takes every bit of the CPU's resources just to fend them off, leaving nothing for anything else, which means that if i tried to type this directly into the WP post window nothing happens, i hit the keys and move the mouse and it just locks up [nothing prints on the screen and the mouse cursor is stuck in place] when i try to type something. my sister's pentium running XP has no such problems.

The chips in a computer can fail due to cosmic rays. Chips do not last forever.

ruveyn

My last server (a run-of-the-mill Asus motherboard) was running 24/7 for almost 10 years until one of the hard disks eventually started failing with bit rot.
I didn't think that was too bad a run...
The current (faster!) one is doing Ok at 18 months power-on time.

Maybe the OP should take a leaf from auntblabby's book and scowl at the OS more, because that's the usual cause of what's perceived as 'computer' failures.
PC hardware, when not subjected to mechanical wear and tear (like spinning disks), poorly specified electronic components (running too hot etc.) - and the random bombardment of cosmic radiation - is practically immortal.

Computers can "fail" because there are a very large number of abstractions between "what the owner wants," "what the programmer wants" and "what the bits of a computer actually do."

As Ruveyn mentioned, they can also fail w.r.t. doing things the bits aren't supposed to be doing at a given moment. I think that condition is sometimes called Entropy.

Because they were made by humans.

I've run win7 64 bit on my AMD 3200+ (939 pin) cpu with 2 gigs of ram. Wasn't exactly peppy but it sure was stable. Actually had less trouble in win7 than in XP. I'd run it now except for the fact my hard drive is getting old and I'd rather not go through installing an OS just to have a failure and have to go through the process all over again, that and I have some older apps on my XP install I don't want to part with.

You can download an app called (click) Windows Sysinternals: Autoruns (click) and go through the complete list of what's being loaded during boot up. From Safe Mode, download and run it. Then weed out all the viruses and they'll be easy to spot on the most part, close the app and reboot. Won't hurt to run a virus checker afterwards. You may also have some services running in the background that for some reason never closed properly. I had to spend 2 evenings on a friends laptop trying to understand and close out 2 services that were running for no good reason. They were both taking up 100% of his cpu, and they were legit apps that just never closed out properly after something he installed. It was "Presentation Font Cache", well that was one of them, happily running for no good reason. Took some research to learn how to remove that one.

i wish somebody like you lived close to me. computers are a mystery to me, i don't have the stereotypical aspie expertise with such. all i know is that my windows bit defender and norton virus killer report no bugs after scans yet my puter is very balky. things like "safe mode" and such, you might as well be telling my cat about this as we [cat and me] both equally are clueless. i just want my POS puter to work acceptably well. no microsoft product i've ever owned worked more than sporadically.

Well Aspies are all different. I just happen to be a computer nerd. I'd almost suggest joining a computer group if there is still such a thing. There really should be. Many issues on PC's can be fixed freely within an hour with the proper know-how. Or 8 hours in my friends case, heh. It takes longer when the computer doesn't want to open a window for 5 minutes. I'd even go as far as saying your "POS puter" is probably a decent machine. One thing you can do is hold the Ctrl-Alt-Delete keys and find the Performance tab. In win7 it'll pop up a blue option menu first and choose task manager or some such wording. That will give you an idea if your computer is running stuff it shouldn't.

i did as you suggested, and i could not find anything that obviously was not supposed to be there, IOW it all seemed to be an organic part of this particular PC's legitimate functioning. on the cpu meter, however, something running in the background [likely the repelling of malware running always in the norton antivirus/antimalware background] kept spiking the cpu usage up to 100% down to 20% back up to 100% all the time. my memory usage seems stuck at 1.15GB. the cpu usage history shows a bunch of spikes going all the way up and down on the graph. i tried other free antivirus programs but norton is the only one which would even let this particular celeron PC run in the first place, the others tied my pc in knots.

Sounds like you have an unwanted service running in the background. Look under processes, and sort under CPU, you may have to hit that twice, it's set to sort lowest first. It should show you what's taking up all your cpu. Or was it Norton that was using it?

http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-A ... 04572.html

I'd suggest this anti-malware program to see if there if you computer is infected with a virus.

A virus can block the installation of anti-virus programs.

that is all so complicated. i looked under "services" and my eyes glazed over at all the things listed, some were "running" and others were "stopped" which made no rhyme nor reason to me. why can't it be simple and transparent to the end user, like a mac? anyways, i couldn't find norton anywhere in the task manager yet i know it is running, it reminds me every few minutes with pop-ups saying "monitoring in background." under CPU in processes, internet explorer hogs the CPU with numbers totalling 99 rhythmically, up and down every second or so.

thank you for your effort. my antivirus and antimalware programs keep telling me my computer is clean. i believe the bulk of the problem is that IE8 or IE9 combined with antivurus and antimalware is too much for a celeron with <2G RAM to run.