Tried Turning It Off And On Again?

That phrase is somewhat a cliché’ amongst the IT professionals these days isn’t it? Often people don’t like this advice due to it not being a true “fix”. There is, however, some logic behind this underwhelming piece of advice. (It’s not just the best quote from the IT Crowd, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Classic.)

If you are one of those people (like me) who all too often doesn’t shut your computer down fully. I.E. sleep mode, hibernate mode or standby mode, you could be causing a slew of issues with your PC. The reason for this is that over time the applications and processes running on your computer will begin to accumulate some leftover digital crud – temporary files, disk caches, page files, open file descriptors, zombie processes and more that hang around long after you’ve closed the associated applications.

Memory leaks are another common problem, which occurs when you thought you’d closed an application long ago, yet the background process is still hogging space in your system, which in turn causes all sorts of performance and reliability issues.

These issues aren’t exclusive to computers that have been running for prolonged periods, it can happen at any point, but it is more common for computers that haven’t been rebooted in a while.

So there you have it, next time you have an issue, and someone says “have you tried turning it off and on again”, you know how and why it works (sometimes).

Bonus: Here’s that clip from IT Crowd. You’re welcome