When you restart a PC, does it completely “shut down”? If it does, what tells it to power up again? If it doesn’t, why does it behave like it has been shut down?
In: Technology
Change computer to analog, for a 5 year old.
**Turn your computer on:** show up to school, get your books and supplies out. Student is a computer, the teacher is giving it directions.
**Put your computer to sleep:** go to recess or lunch. You leave your books and supplies out, the teacher turns off the lights in the classroom, but you haven’t put anything away yet. You can pick up where you left off without losing your place or any work that’s unfinished.
**Hibernating your computer:** you go home for the night and safely organize your work at your desk, bookmark your book, and put it away. The books are not out of the desk, but they are bookmarked so you can find your place quickly.
**Shutting down your computer:** You close all of your books and put everything away safely and neatly. You have to find and open everything manually to find where you left off the previous day. It takes the longest, but you start fresh and don’t have a lot of clutter right away.
**Restarting your computer:** the teacher tells you to pack everything up neatly, wash your desk, and then get everything back out. You never leave the room.
**Power outage:** the teacher walks around and throws everything on your desk in a box. Some of it might fall on the floor, but most of it is in the box. most of your work is still there, but it might take you longer to organize it all and start up again.
A little more in-depth: Windows 10 for most users combines sleep, hibernation, and shutdown. There’s still different sleep states, but those system buttons behave similarly. If you ever look at *system uptime* in Windows 10, it might show its been running for months. That’s because when you shut it down, it’s actually hibernating.
Restarting closes all of the program that’s running, tells the motherboard to stay powered on, and then naturally begins running those programs again. The computer never powers off, but it does terminate every piece of code that is being processed.
Between those two piece of information, and with my experience in IT, ever since like 2005 era computing, restarting is VERY different than shutdown and manually turning it back on.
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