I work at a major tech company and most times I go to IT, they tell us to restart our computer. Why is this a necessary process to maintain a normal operating experience?
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The reason they tell you to restart it is because computers tend to start working correctly from a fresh boot.
But also, computers need to install updates, and typically need to do so while being booted (and can’t update on-the-fly). So restarting does that for you.
To refresh all the system memory registers. I realize that I do this as a habit from my old work. well, it’s easier to do this everyday than to deal with tech issues.
Your computer’s memory is full of programs. They’re starting and stopping all the time as you open and close whatever apps and tools you use. Sometimes one of them stops working correctly and causes a problem.
Restarting the computer guarantees that the memory gets a fresh start.
It’s a lazy debugging step on support’s part (it would be better to find a problem and fix it), but it also works a lot of the time and it’s quick.
Rebooting is like moving into a new home. Everything starts off clean. After you live there a while, dust collects under the fridge and all the other places that are forgotten. A reboot is moving out, doing a full clean, and moving back in.
The only thing a computer actually knows how to do is add 1 + 1 because we can make it do this billions of time a second and we’ve spent a long time messing with it we’ve found ways of doing a lot of stuff with this but sometimes the thing it has to do involves a lot of steps and adding and there are unattended effects or info that gets held onto just in case it’s needed again.
Restarting basically sets everything back to zero and dumps out all the stuff being held onto so when you start again those little issues no longer matter because it takes a lot of them a long time to become and issue that needs a new restart.
Also on a modern oc restarting takes like 2 minutes, just do it before you call IT…
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Two reasons. Computers do a lot of math. Billions of calculations every second. And because of how binary math works, none of that math involves decimals or fractions or negative values. Everything is a positive whole integer. But we need all the other stuff in math, so we’ve figured out clever ways to represent those values. Where the decimal goes or whether a number requires a +- sign, etc. But that leads to a lot of rounding. Over time, rounding can lead to errors. If you round from 4 down to 0 once per second, and from 6 up to 10 once per second, you come out even over time. But if you only round from 6 to 10 every second, you artificially add 4 every single time, introducing error. This error may or may not cause issues, and sometimes it takes a long time to see it. When you restart the computer, the math blocks restart from 0, flushing the accumulated error.
The second reason is memory leak. When a program opens, the computer finds a block of free memory it can use and tells the program where it is. The program may use all of it, or part of it, and can even request more. When the program ends, or even just a small temporary process within the program, it is supposed to release that borrowed memory block back to the processor. The processor does not track the blocks loaned out, that’s done by the program, it just sees a flag that a certain block has already been assigned and so it can’t be assigned right now. But tracking all of the memory blocks used by the program can be challenging, even with very good programming. So it’s not guaranteed that all of it will be released. With a huge amount of memory and simple programs only needing small amounts, this can be a non-issue for many months. But with large programs like photoshop or graphics heavy games, a lot of memory is needed at once. If a ton of small chunks of memory have been claimed over time but not released, the computer has to sort through many, many small areas of free space instead of one large chunk to give to the program. This takes additional time for the processor to sort and leads to lag. If enough memory has been leaked, the program won’t even start. A power reset forces all programs and processes to end, thereby force flushing all of the memory chunks back to unclaimed.
Majority of the little quirks and problems a computer has can be fixed by just rebooting it. Forcing it to quit all the processes and restart them from scratch. So rather than waste time trying to track down one weird process that got hung up somewhere, they just have you restart it. that way you can weed out 90% of the problems you encounter.
1. Updates may change the core operating system files. Having your computer using/accessing them while updating can lead to corruption.
2. Programs are often not perfect and have memory leaks, if programs are not restarted every so often, they can end up consuming too much ram and crashing.
3. Servers often use ECC (Error check control) memory. This checks for any corruption in memory and automatically corrects it. Desktops do not do this as a random memory error may only happen once every few days, a minor enough issue not to worry about for a single user, but for a server that needs to be up for months at a time, this is a significant concern.
It’s only necessary because you guys don’t know how to use computers without creating system instability
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