Why Does Rebooting Fix So Many Problems?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
925 words · ~4 min read
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been there your computer won't respond to Mouse clicks the keyboard on your
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smartphone is stopped working or your game console suddenly gets stuck in
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perma's screenshot mode fortunately there's often an easy fix for these
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catastrophic crashes turn it off and then turn it back on again and then
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oftentimes the issue has mysteriously
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vanished like sleeping off a night of heavy drinking but why does rebooting or
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at least restarting a problematic program seemed to be some kind of
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magical cure-all for your technology well it comes down to the fact that most
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computer freezes happen because of some kind of mishap that your system can't
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recover from on its own think of it this way suppose you're on a road trip and
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you see that the road is blocked off ahead because a truck overturned and
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Spilled five tons of thumbtacks but that
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doesn't pose a problem for you since you can just take the nearest exit navigate
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a few back roads and then get back on the highway a short while later but then
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let's say later on you come across a collapsed Bridge that's the only way to
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access a river for hundreds of miles on either side unless you somehow figure
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out a way to Your Wagon and float it across without losing a hundred
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pounds of buffalo meat you don't have any choice but to turn back around the
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way you came and start Down A New Path computers work similarly when they
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encounter a problem if the issue is more minor your system might be smart enough
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to work around it on its own for example if you're using a wired Ethernet
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connection and your adapter starts to misbehave it can transition over to
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Wi-Fi no problem so that you can carry on computing kind of like the Thumbtack
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truck example but in more serious cases like the collapsed Bridge your computer
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simply can't find a way through or
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around once they occur and it has to
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start back at square one sometimes code is written in a way that
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whatever program you're running expects some resource it's using to be present
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and behave a certain way a good example of this is certain blue screens of death
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in Windows such as the infamous page fault in non-paged area which in
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layman's terms means that Windows was trying to access a piece of data in
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memory that simply wasn't there and the
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code doesn't know what to do next kind of like when you encounter a vaguely
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worded exam question on a topic you didn't study in this case rebooting
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forces the Windows code to reload from
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the very beginning getting your system functioning again but even if your
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computer isn't hopelessly stuck in a blue screen it may be running very
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sluggishly due to a temperamental individual program
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badly written code can be stymied when it encounters an unexpected problem like
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in the Windows example or certain conditions can cause it to run in what's
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called an infinite Loop like like a trick dictionary that keeps sending you
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back and forth between two words Loops can hog lots of CPU time on your
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computer since the program won't stop and they can also make it difficult to
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force quit the program meaning that a reboot can break the loop and get you
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running again so that you can angrily uninstall the offending application and
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even applications that are behaving more or less normally can open up background
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processes that can hog memory or CPU
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Cycles or be affected themselves by
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other malfunctioning programs so a reboot will kill those processes and
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when your system starts back up only what it normally loads will be present
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in memory and since errors that programs simply aren't smart enough to recover
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from are so common turning it off and turning it back on again has become one
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of the key components of becoming your family's resident I.T expert along with
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the basic ability to search Google for troubleshooting tips
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