Probably the main benefit of Windows is that it allows you to run multiple applications simultaneously. Each application is supposed to be isolated from the others while it runs. The truth is, that any application can crash the entire system, especially if it is error-prone, or if you are running several complex tasks such as multimedia applications with sound and video, or if your hardware is not exactly state-of-the-art. When a misbehaving program runs, or when there is a hardware glitch, any program can corrupt the environment of other programs, slow them to a crawl, or crash the entire system. You simply have no control over this, and neither do we.

So what do you do? In addition to the above, we recommend the following precautions:

• Check with your computer specialist to make certain that you have enough RAM and disk space to accommodate your computing needs under Windows. Problems with impaired performance and crashes can often be traced to an under-powered machine. Despite the labels on the box, we recommend a Pentium processor and at least 16MB of RAM.
• Make certain that your Windows swap-file is at least twice as big as the amount of RAM installed on your system and a minimum of 64 megabytes. This is set in the [tooltup slug=”control-panel”]Control Panel[/tooltip]. On many systems this is handled automatically by Windows. Increasing the swap file may even increase performance a bit.
• Do not run compute intensive tasks such as multimedia when running SAFE EE.
• Do not run communications tasks (besides those launched from within Simple Accounting, of course!) while also running Simple Accounting. These are notorious for locking up during file transfers and crashing the entire system.
• Do not run disk intensive tasks in other applications in the background while you are running Simple Accounting. For example, we do not recommend that you sort a 4000 row spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel in the background while entering new transactions in Simple Accounting.

We’re not trying to be too pessimistic here. But we do feel it is important to stress a certain amount of care as being the price of the increased power and convenience of Windows.