E.g computers, Wi-Fi routers, tvs, consoles. All these items malfunction every once in while and all I do is turn them off then on again to get them working again. Why?
In: Technology
Most electronics work via a chip that has memory of what it is supposed to do. Like a set of instructions. Sometimes it gets overwhelmed and loses its place. When you turn it off and back on, you reset it to start back at step one, so now it knows its place and what to do next.
Imagine you’ve been given a set of 50 directions to follow. You got one step wrong, but you don’t actually know this until you’ve completed all 50 steps and aren’t where you should be. You’re given 2 options – retrace your steps to try and figure out where you went wrong, or just start again from the beginning.
Restarting your device is equivalent to starting the journey again. Except your device is running millions of instructions, and sometimes it’s near impossible to figure out which of them went wrong, and it might not even be possible to fix it.
Usually there is a set of processes that start and work in unison when a device is first powered on, from simple to complex. Sometimes there can be issues that arise after one of those processes fails or becomes unstable. Well designed systems will start and recover those components, but sometimes a reboot or power off, is the easiest way to get things back into a cleanly started and stable state.
Actual 5 year old version: Most electronic gizmo’s are way more complicated that you can possibly imagine. It’s a miracle that they work as often as they do, and we’re lucky that the huge groups of researchers and engineers have figured out ways to get them to work, sometimes, by just turning the power off and back on.
This is a good thing to keep in mind when you’re older, and thinking about buying a self-driving car. Now how about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
* Devices like these are tested before they are released.
* The makers try their best to test under many different circumstances.
* However it’s impossible to test them all.
* After a device is running for a long time, it’s possible some combination of values causes a previously unknown error to cause the device to freeze up.
* Restarting it resets all the values in memory and returns the device to its starting condition which is a state that has been tested very thoroughly.
Sometimes a program accidentally starts an infinite loop due to some sort of error or something, so when you restart it the loop is gone and it can work again
In addition to what everyone else already said, most of the testing for ordinary products is done under ideal conditions; the device just turned on with a fresh software installation and no pre-existing save data. It is more expensive to fully test what happens when a device was left on for a long time, so it is more likely that they missed a problem.
Computer programs, pure and simple. In your device are programs that make it behave the way you need it to. And those programs aren’t perfect.
ANALOGY: You’re in your car, following a sheet of written instructions on how to get to your destination. They’re extremely well-written, but just at the point where it says “turn left at the house with the red fence” your view gets blocked by the biggest truck you ever saw. So you don’t see the fence and you miss the turn, and it’s 10 minutes later, and you’re lost. And the road is narrow – you can’t even turn around and go back. You’re not going to where you ought to be any time soon.
BUT! On the steering wheel is a Big Magic Button marked, “Start over!” You push it, and – wow – you’re back at the start of your journey. Now you can follow the instructions again. And this time there’s no truck, you make the correct turn, and you get to where you want to be.
Computer code is a bit like that. It has the places it’s supposed to go. But there are ALWAYS bugs in code. And sometimes, things happen in just the wrong ways, and suddenly the code is heading off into new and wonderful places that the people who wrote it never intended. It’s hopelessly lost, and there’s no way it’s finding its way back. But – you have a Big Magic Button. You turn it off; you turn it back on again. It forgets what it was doing, and starts again at the beginning, the way it always does when it’s turned on. And likely goes where it’s supposed to go, and hopefully doesn’t get distracted again (for a decent while, at least).
Always worth a try, basically.
2 main reasons, usually either some code had bugged up and is running endlessly incapable of achieving its goal and just wasting resources, or a memory problem. Your memory/RAM holds onto files that the program expects it may need to access soon so it can load it faster than loading from your hard drive. Once youre done with some data in ram, you have to clear it to make room for more. Sometimes programs fail to clear your RAM, so it fills up to the brim and slows everything down as your computer now functionally has no RAM and has to get all data straight from the hard drive. RAM isnt able to hold any data without power though, so by turning it off you completely clear out every bit of data that was clogging it.
Most electronics have two types of memory: persistent (think your hard drive) and temporary (think you RAM).
Programs are stored in the persistent memory, but anything they run or calculate is stored in the temporary memory. You change menu? That’s in the temporary memory. What is visible on screen right now? Temporary memory.
So if there is a bug in the program, it means that some wrong information has been written to the temporary memory. Maybe you’ve executed a very specific sequence of instructions that cause an unexpected piece of the code to misbehave.
Restarting the electronics allows you to back to a “blank slate”.
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