I have always been sceptical of software products that promise to prevent the dreaded PC crash. They never seem to work.
I still have that scepticism after reviewing Norton CrashGuard Deluxe 3.0 for Windows 95 from Symantec. The packaging promises 'twice' the crash protection without telling me what the 'twice' is relative to.
The program has two main sections, CrashGuard 3.0 and System Check. CrashGuard loads at boot time and watches for crashes and errors that can lead to program freezes or failures and the loss of data associated with such incidents.
When a program crashes, it pops up a window indicating the likelihood of recovering from the crash long enough to save data. The user can choose to attempt to fix the problem or simply close the application.
While CrashGuard allows you to simulate many types of errors and crash conditions to prove that it can recover from them, it does not prove it will have the same success in a real computing situation.
On top of this, CrashGuard offers an anti-freezing ability. Some applications freeze without generating an error or a crash. In Windows 95, the traditional solution to this was to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and end the task of the non-responsive application.
Now users have an additional choice: an Anti-Freeze button. If the user chooses to unfreeze an application, CrashGuard will attempt to do so and succeed at least some of the time.