I have noted that there are several people that have regular problems with
some scanning software whilst others have no problems. Some of these may be
due to a general unreliability in your system. If your image processing
software can be used without any problems this may indicate otherwise but
it's difficult to be sure.
Anyone experiencing regular problems may like to try the Prime95 torture
test (as I recently suggested to Stan). I believe there are versions for
Macs (and others) as well as PC's. It's frequently used by overclockers to
test whether their system is stable. If your system can't run it
successfully for at least a few minutes you've got serious cpu/memory or
heat problems. These will regularly cause your programs to fail
unpredictably.
You can download Prime95 here:
You can set it running at start up and continue to work with little
noticeable slowdown in performance it just mops up any spare resources. You
can set it to use upto 90% (enter 100% and it tells you the max) of
physical memory under options->cpu and it will still not effect your general
performance. If your PC has any cpu/memory (or overheating) problems the
program will throw up an error.
Similar number cruncher that many are familiar is Seti. But I don't know if
it as a similar severe test.
Steve
