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Correlation May Not Imply Causation

I use the word correlation, perhaps slightly incorrectly, to refer to two behaviors or symptoms that appear at the same time. Causation refers to two events where one is responsible for the other's appearance or existence. So what I am saying here is that if you see two strange things happening at the same time on your PC, this does not necessarily mean that one of them has caused the other. They could be coincidental, or it could be that where you think A is causing B, B is really causing A.

For example, you may find two symptoms on your machine: you have frequent file system corruption on your hard disk, and you have a lot of system lockups (hangs, crashes). You may think that the crashes are causing the file system errors, and in many cases this is true. However it is possible for the file system errors to cause the lockups. And it is also possible that both are just symptoms of another underlying cause.

Next: Scan For File System Problems

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