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
The reason why the same method works to fix computers, routers, TVs, and pretty much every other piece of electronics on the market today is that they almost all have computers in them. It’s cheaper to buy a mass-produced *microcontroller*, a.k.a. a small, low-power, single-chip computer designed to control things, than it would be to make custom control electronics.
As for why turning it on and off works, that’s because of it resets the program running on that computer back to the start. You can think of a program like a choose-your-own-adventure book. The pages, called *instructions* tell the processor to perform certain actions, like doing arithmetic, reading input, or sending output. If you give the program an input it wasn’t designed to handle, it can get stuck in a state where it can’t do anything useful, since the data in memory tells it whether or not to jump, and where to jump to. When you turn it off and back on again, you always get back to the first page, at which point it starts working again.
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