The box contains the program on cd-rom and a 24 page user’s manual. The installation instruction is clear and simple; insert the cd in your drive and it autostarts (if you have it activated) to the install menu screen. I used all the default settings for the location of the program.

The installation took only a minute or so. A shield is then placed on your task bar. Right clicking on the shield pops open a window with five options:

• Open
• Monitor 16 bit crashes
• Monitor 32 bit crashes
• Add Unfreeze to Ctrl+Alt+Del button, and
• Exit

The manual claims that all your applications are monitored as they run. To test this out I right clicked on the shield on the task bar as I was writing this part of the review and the Crash Defender Window opened. The top half of the window is a box that shows the name of the application running and being monitored. It did show WordPerfect.

Below this window is another box indicating that both 16 bit and 32 bit programs are being monitored. To the right of this are two boxes. One says "UNFREEZE" and below it the other box says "END TASK". Across the bottom are three buttons: CLOSE, EXIT and HELP. CLOSE minimizes the window to the task bar, EXIT closes the program and stops all crash defending and Help is obvious.

I’ve had one crash so far. It happens occasionally when I scan something and try to print it out on my laser printer. The scanner is parallel port and has a pass-through for the printer. This is the kind of crash we all dread when everything freezes including the mouse pointer. Crash defender was not able to intercept this crash and my whole computer froze.

I’ve been messing with computers since 1978 and I don’t recall ever having just one application freezing the screen. Which leads me to wonder what good is the "Unfreeze" button if you can’t access it.

I loaded Crash Defender on my other computer with mixed results. I’ve been using WordPerfect for many years and have never had a crash occasioned by it. But shortly after installing Crash Defender it detected crashes in WP8 on two separate occasions. I had a document open and had selected portions of it to cut and paste. I opened my Edit menu and selected Copy and crashed! Crash Defender opened and said that WP.exe was trying to address a memory location to which it did not have access and was unstable. I chose "Fix" from the Crash Defender menu and instead of fixing WordPerfect, I received the familiar "This program has performed an illegal operation..." message. I clicked on "OK" and WordPerfect closed.

Crash Defender could not fix the crash and I’m convinced that Crash Defender caused the crash in the first place. This same scenario happened a second time in another session of WordPerfect under the same exact circumstances. In the case of a freeze-up you can’t access Crash Defender and its "unfreeze" function and I’ve had crashes with WordPerfect since installing Crash Defender that I never had before.

On my other machine I was working on Printmaster and cut an image to move to WP8 and Crash Defender detected a crash in WP8 that it could not fix. I removed Crash Defender from that machine and have no more problem with crashes. I have removed Crash Defender from both my computers and am returning it to the Club for another member to review if they desire. I know Crash Defender does not work for me.

For the record both my computers are IBM’s with 64 megs of memory. One has an Intel Pentium 200 processor with MMX, the other has an AMD K6-2 300. The oldest one is only 14 months old. Both run Windows 98 and are unusually stable.

Crash Defender may work for you, but it caused me more grief than it prevented.