crash

One of the latest and popular game titles from Blizzard Entertainment is StarCraft 2, which was released about two months ago. As with many modern games, this title has some advanced graphics that may at times be demanding on video cards, which in turn causes them to heat up. Heat generation is the nature of anything that demands processing power, but with StarCraft a couple of people have reported the game causing their hardware to overheat and fail.

Recently we were contacted by a MacFixIt reader and StarCraft player "Ricardo" who mentioned that the game ran only a … Read more

Putting your Mac in Sleep mode is a good way to restore the system to its last state so you can continue your work where you left off; however, it does not come without a few potential drawbacks. One of them is that even though OS X is designed to be run continually without needing to restart, sometimes going for a period without refreshing the system with a restart can result in a few periodic pauses and slowdowns.

Not only can small slowdowns occur, but when the system wakes from sleep all the processes are brought back into memory at … Read more

Apple has released an update for 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro systems released in mid-2010, which addresses a problem that could cause freezes and hangs during use, and more notably during start-up. The prevalence of this problem is rare, but has affected a few systems.

In addition to the freezes and hangs, the update addresses compatibility issues with external displays.

In order to install the update, you will need to have your external power supply attached and should expect a gray screen with a status bar appear when the system reboots. It is important that you do not interrupt this … Read more

Sometimes, errors can occur in Mail where the program will periodically hang, crash, or freeze, and will require a force-quit. Several things could cause this, including faulty preferences, corrupt mailboxes that need rebuilding, and errors in individual messages that result in odd behavior whenever the message is displayed. In addition to these possibilities, some shared resources that Mail uses could also contribute to crashes and hangs.

Preferences One of the first things to try when a program crashes or does not work properly is to remove its preferences. In this case, Mail's preferences are called "com.apple.Mail.… Read more

The Spanair plane crash that killed 154 people two years ago Friday may have been partly caused by malware, according to reports.

El Pais, Spain's top newspaper, reported Friday that Spanair's mainframe was contaminated with Trojans at the time that Flight JK 5022 to Gran Canaria crashed just after take-off at Madrid's Barajas airport.

The mainframe was supposed to raise the alarm when three similar technical problems were noted, but did not do so due to the infestation, El Pais said.

According to the report, investigating judge Juan David Perez has ordered Spanair to turn over relevant … Read more

Most automotive crash avoidance systems are on the lookout for objects directly in front of the vehicle, but Ford is working on technology that's also going to help prevent cars from getting T-boned at intersections.

Ford's Automatic Braking Intersection Collision Avoidance System (ABICAS), which is under development, uses radio-based wireless sensors rather than camera-based sensors to detect other vehicles outfitted with the same technology within a 360-degree radius. Using vehicle-to-vehicle communication, GPS, navigation maps, and complex traffic algorithms, the ABICAS can alert the driver of possible accidents at an intersection and intervene by alerting the driver and activating … Read more

A number of people have complained about Safari often crashing on their systems. While Apple's latest Safari update (5.0.1) is supposed to address some stability issues with the program,  a number of people are complaining of crashes. Here are some things you can try to hopefully clear these problems.

General maintenanceThere are some general maintenance routines you can run both on Safari and on the system to help clear problems. In Safari, try clearing cookies and caches, among other items in the "Reset Safari" option in the Safari menu. You can also run general … Read more

To date, most safety features have been about protecting vehicle occupants in a crash, but more manufacturers are adding active safety technology to vehicles that prevents accidents from occurring in the first place.

Nissan announced Tuesday its Forward Collision Avoidance Assist concept, which uses radar sensors to monitor the distance and relative speed of objects in front of the vehicle and delivers early alerts to warn of impending accidents. If the driver doesn't slow down quickly enough, the system will also intervene to prevent an accident by pushing up the accelerator pedal and partially applying the brakes to assist … Read more

Mozilla pushed out a minor update to Firefox on Saturday, slightly adjusting the new plug-in crash protection feature that was introduced last week. Firefox 3.6.6 for Windows and Linux delays the amount of time that the plug-in protection module will wait before terminating an unresponsive plug-in.

Mozilla evangelist Mike Beltzner said in a blog post on Saturday that although Firefox 3.6.4 was beta-tested with nearly 1 million users, after its release the company began hearing complaints from some users, especially those playing games on older computers. The crash protection feature would only wait 10 seconds before … Read more