Note: This is a article tells you why your computer freezes, and not how to fix it.

Isn’t it annoying how sometimes software on your computer freezes when you’re trying to use it? Even wonder why that happens? Well if so, read on.

First, to understand why, you’ll have to know what “Threads” are. I don’t mean those strings that you sew with, I’m talking about a computer Thread. (If you already know what they are, you can just skip the next paragraph)

A Thread is basically a part of the computer that can do something. You can have (theoretically) an infinite amount of threads running at once (not realistically though due to hardware limitations). Each Thread has a set of instructions for your computer to follow, and when your computer finishes those instructions, the Thread closes. Your computer is multitasking, and running all the active Threads on your computer at once. This is why it helps to close extra applications (which have their own threads) when playing a computer intensive game like Call of Duty. Then there’s less things for your computer to be doing, and it can focus on calculating whatever calculations it needs to calculate for COD.

Every software program has at least one thread: the main thread. In a program with a Graphical User Interface (GUI, meaning it has buttons and stuff), the main thread is the thread that lets you push buttons. In probably most programs, when you push a button, its the main thread that handles the button press. While the main thread is handling the button press, it can’t let you press buttons (remember, a single thread can’t do two things at once). So the Graphics User Interface freezes while the calculations are being made.

This especially happens when you first turn on your computer. Your computer is still finishing up with starting up your computer, but you open a browser (or any other program). It takes the browser a long time to load, because there are still a bunch of threads still running from the computer start up, and there are the thread(s) that are starting up your internet browser. More threads = slower computer = frozen internet browser.