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Bad hardware

When you find a crash in the wild that only one user gets, it could be bad hardware. If that same user has a bunch of different and unique-to-them crashes, it’s even more likely.

I would see these often when developing games for PCs. Crashes in drivers, crashes in areas that were unexplainable. Before this I would diagnose PCs as a service technician at Sprite Computers.

Sometimes it’s a hardware issue. It could be defective RAM, or an overheating CPU. It could be a driver bug, or an operating system install issue. Even mobile phones can have unexplainable behaviour that goes away with restarts or upgrades.

Most crashes aren’t bad hardware. Memory overruns or uncapped render loops can look like bad hardware, so beware!

The bottom line is that you can’t fix bad hardware in your software. You can only minimize the time it takes to figure out whether an issue is due to bad hardware or not.

- Karl

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