I know it works most of the time with my pc and my smartphone, but yesterday at the dentist a drill didn’t work correctly, so they turned the entire chair and all the appliances connected to it off and on and the drill was working again. Why does this fix so many problems when nothing is changed in the hardware itself?
In: Technology
Many complicated tools and devices rely on a computer to function. Computers are incredibly complex, and in complex systems you will inevitably encounter an error. This can be caused by a programmer making a mistake, by a flaw in the hardware, or numerous other things that could go wrong. Sometimes, one error can be overcome, but as a computer continues to run for long periods of time there are more chances for errors it can’t overcome, or for an accumulation of errors that combined cause a problem.
Computer systems are designed to overcome a lot, but there is always a limit to what they can handle, eventually they inevitably find themselves in a state they can’t go back from, and can’t go forward from. So the solution, is to reset the computer to a base state, a state that it always knows how to go forward form.
By turning it off, removing all power, we rest the state completely. Then when we power it on, it behaves as it always does upon being powered on, which should be perfectly functional.
For much more complex systems, like a PC or smartphone, which can store a lot of data even while off, sometimes errors can persist even after you turn off the power. This is why you often eventually need to do a “factory rest” which also deletes all the data – somewhere in that data is something wrong, or typically many somethings wrong, and all added together the system just isn’t working correctly, unless you delete it all and start from scratch.
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