How exactly does “turning it off and on again” fix such a wide variety of different tech problems?
In: 7462
Quick answer, basically turning it off and on again resets the entire chain of events that makes the object work, therefore, if there is some mistake in any step or during usage it can usually be solved by restarting (this was a really simple explanation, there are better ones)
[removed]
Your computer takes little bits of data to make it’s life easier and stores them in memory.
As long as it has some kind of power, like a watch battery in the example of a PC, it keeps them tucked away for future reference.
Over time data can get corrupted, or too much memory is taken up, or it gets stuck. Whatever the reason, you get a problem.
When you power it down it clears the memory and lets the device start from fresh.
When machines start up, they goes through a routine to put everything in the right place.
It’s like when you wake up for school, brush your hair, put on clean clothes, and eat breakfast. You are ready for anything.
Well some days are very bad. Maybe you fell in a puddle, ruined your clothes, got your lunch wet. You never could have prepared for this and now your day is ruined.
Nothing you do will salvage this day. You can’t get the mud out of your clothes. You can’t eat that lunch now. Sometimes the best thing is to just call it, go home, and start over again fresh tomorrow.
Modern electronic systems include a massive number of sub components, many of which maintain their own state and that can’t be returned to a known state without them being reset. And while hardware designers might provide reset signals for parts of the components, by far the simplest route to ensure everything is back in order is to remove the power and let the normal power sequencing take its course to return the system back to normal.
Most technology has a kind of “bootstrap” process where it goes from a starting condition, like setting up all the dominos, then rolls out from there.
If something goes wrong, setting up the dominos and trying again from scratch is a viable solution because it’s likely that the weird little quirk that broke it won’t happen a second time.
[removed]
Computers are VERY complex. Everything depends on many many things. All it takes is for one little thing to go wrong, and it cascades causing failures that may be impossible to diagnose and trace, or at least takes much longer than the problem is worth.
Turning it off and on again means that the computer wipes its memory and starts with a clean slate. This often removes the single error that caused all the other problems, and everything works again.
This isn’t just for computers, but for any complex system with a series of dependences that are reset after power cycling.
If you’re working on a math problem with a lot of steps and somewhere along the way you mess things up, sometimes it’s easier to start over than it is to try to find your mistake and fix it.
A lot of problems are a result of things ending up in a bad/unstable state. Turning the machine off and back on resets the state back to the beginning.
For example, when you start your PC up, there’s a service called “spooler.exe” that gets launched. It handles printing, so if it glitches out or stops running, you can’t print anything. Restarting the PC will also restart that service.
Now it is possible to restart the service without rebooting, but you’d have to figure out that was the problem first. There are many other things that could affect printing. Doing a reboot right off the bat can avoid a lengthy diagnosis process. So it’s a good first step in troubleshooting.
Edit:typo
Latest Answers