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
There are many subsystems inside your PC. Some have smarts to do things on their own. Using the shutdown gracefully prepares the most of PC for a loss of power. Then the motherboard signals the power supply to cut power. The power supply goes into a low power mode and waits for the power button in the case it be pushed.
A restart is all of that, except instead of the motherboard signaling the power supply to cut power, the motherboard just starts a normal start sequence.
It’s virtually the same thing. But sometimes you do have to shutdown, flip the physical switch on the power supply and unplug when you need a true full power loss to clear some low level caches or some cranky hardware. By this point you are usually following some advice on the web.
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