Could you explain in the form of an analogy? Also, has this improved over time? Does it have anything to do with registry and defrag? Is it different for Mac vs PC? Thank you 🙂
In: Technology
Kay, first thing you need to understand is computers do not ‘remember’ anything. Every time you turn it on it essentially pulls up a checklist/instruction manual that has to reteach it how to do everything it does. Once it’s shut off everything it knew is reduced to 0 and it has to do it all over again when it boots.
Follow that? Cool. Now one of the big reasons for computers slowing down is storage. You’ve got 3 things to worry about: The Hard drive, the CPU and the RAM. The hard drive is basically a rack of file cabinets. It has everything you’ve ever stored in various file folders throughout the cabinets. The CPU is the secretary, she goes around picking up files, putting them away, doing all the actual ‘work.’ The RAM is her desk, the more Ram the bigger her desk is and thus more room to do the actual work.
When you run a program, your asking the CPU to go to the harddrive, pull the relevant files, lay them out on the desk and go do something with them. Each of these takes space; like laying papers and books on your desk. The more things you try and do at once the more space it takes up. If you don’t have enough RAM you run out of space and have to start piling things atop each other, can’t find things, etc. More ram means more desk space meaning you can do 3-4 things at once without as much difficulty.
Likewise the CPU is the speed which they can do those things. You can have a huge friggin desk but if you have a 90 year old lady doing the work it’s still gonna be slow. Same with having a super fast worker but having to work on a dinky little school desk barely large enough for a sheet of paper.
Now as they do stuff the paperwork accumulates. You move stuff around, set this aside to grab that, flip back and forth between 3 different books, stack things atop eachother, etc. As your running out of room it slows everything down because now you’ve got to go find the stuff your need to do the task your working on.
Restarting the computer you’ll recall is essentially putting everything away. It clears everything off the desk, shoves everything back in the file cabinets, and starts over from step 1 and a clean desk. All the clutter that has built up has been thrown away or put away, thus speeding up their work again.
This is also why it fixes so many computer issues. If your doing a complicated Lego model and make a mistake somewhere, it affects everything else after that. Restarting the computer is breaking the model with a hammer and starting over again from step 1, hopefully following the instructions correctly this time. That’s why tech support asks you to start with restarting the computer, since telling the computer ‘Go to step 1 and do it all over again’ will fix most issues.
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