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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Computers can work flawlessly for decades. Windows can’t.
Sometimes software will reach a state where it’s not supposed to be. Then one needs to load a known good state and try again. Sometimes hardware does the same, but that’s less likely.
Think of it like a Jenga tower. The beginning part is well understood and works wonderfully you can even go back and correct some early mistakes. Then you need a wider base, add more pieces, continue adding and adding.
You are not perfect and the pieces don’t always go to the right place. And at some point you can’t get in and fix it without digging into the core. Unexpected piece shapes get placed, some get knocked off without you realizing, the ground shakes, you get tired.
Your job isn’t to build the highest tower though, it’s to place blocks. At some point it’s better to restart from flat ground with a good pile of pieces.
Think of the software as a child who has just walked into a neatly tidied playroom. As the day goes on, they would take toys and books out of their respective storages and lay them all around the room.
A disciplined child would put the stuff back once they’re done with it, a busy child may have them laying around because they’re never “done with them” and want to quickly access them whenever, and naughty child would have stuff in random places just because.
When you have multiple children with different behaviors in the same room, it will eventually become too messy for anyone to navigate around and find stuff, therefore everything starts to slow down. A reset would clear the room of the children and everything they have taken out, and revert it back to it’s clean slate for the next time.
Think of your computer’s inner workings as being like a giant city. Things are constantly in motion. Everything is an instruction or the response to an instruction and everything happens for a very specific reason. Barring hardware failure or solar flares, everything works perfectly.
Now, put that perfectly orchestrated system in the hands of people to direct.
So when the human dispatches all of the bread trucks to the supermarkets in the city in the morning, he forgets one. Or he did the math wrong. Or he sent two trucks to one place and no trucks to another place.
Over time, these little snarls and hangups can really add up. Previously reliable routes are suddenly broken. The human tries to allocate space for the computer city festival but there’s no space to be had because all the possible venues are full of broken down bread trucks.
So when you restart the PC, you clear away all the broken down trucks, traffic snarls, and other systemic breakdowns that took place since the last time you rebooted, and you get to start over with a fresh slate.
At the most basic level it is not required for the computer to operate normally: However if you are having a problem then the computer is not operating normally.
IT is asking you to reboot the computer because it is going to do a number of things, mostly unload all the software currently running and copy fresh files into memory from the hard disk. A good percent of the time the error you encountered was an error in that running software.
From a practical standpoint this is likely to solve your issue, but it is also the first thing the IT team is likely to do unless they specifically recognize what is wrong and already have a fix, so it saves you time, and if the problem does re-occur it saves the IT team and you time by cutting to that chase.
Frankly computers sometimes do weird things, unless it is a repeating issue you need to restart your software, and then restart your computer before bothering IT.
Many replies here will tell you the same thing: memory leak and updates.
The real reason you are specifically asked to RESTART and not just “shut down and power on again” is because you are probably using Windows, and a feature of Windows that’s intended to make the computer switch on faster, means it doesn’t usually fully shut down. Restarting ensures a proper reboot.
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My favorite way to explain this is imagine a computer is an office.
Your hard drive is a bookshelf, your ram is a desk, and the CPU is an office worker.
When the worker needs information, the go to the bookshelf and grab a book with some information and maybe read it or edit it but it’s on their desk. And theyre actively using it.
The desk is only so big so only so many books can be on the desk at any given time. (The amount of ram you have) so as the desk piles up, the worker has to put books back to make room for new books.
As the desk gets more cluttered and the worker makes more notes and edits, they start to get a bunch of books on their desk and lots of things to keep track of.
Here’s the kicker, most of those books are alive and are doing their own work and may or may not be talking to each other or the worker to let them know. Things can get real chaotic as the books do their own thing and the worker is trying to keep tabs on them. Some go rouge and do whatever they want.
A reboot basically tells the computer to clean off the desk, put the books on the shelf and start fresh tomorrow. Everything gets put to bed and starts fresh.
Zombie processes. They’re bits of code that should have terminated but instead they continue living and wandering around inside the PC, eating the brains of other processes.
A reboot shuts down all processes, including zombies, and starts only what is supposed to be running.
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