Did You Try Turning It Off And On?

This is my favourite line from The IT Crowd and a line use every single day. In fact, sometimes 10 times a day. When I provide IT support, I invariably find that people do not try this simple solution to most problems.

One day, I got a call to come fix someones computer. I drove 30 mins to their home, did a two minute meet and greet, did a thirty second “refuse-coffee” and was shown the problem. It took the person 5 minutes to explain the problem. So, I sat down restarted the PC and guess what…. Exactly. She paid me to come all the way out there to do that.

So why does it work?

Simply because of the way computers/windows/processes work. The more things you install and the more things you open the more processes that are started up. When a process or application goes rogue, then this invariably uses up a lot of CPU power and memory leaks. It uses up space that is normally available for other applications. This problem is also caused when an application doesn’t shutdown correctly.

So when you restart, you close these unnecessary rogue processes and buy back your memory and CPU reserves. It should be the first thing you do if you don’t know how to stop processes manually. However, thats not as hard as it looks and was covered here in this article -

How To Deal With A Slow Computer Using Task Manager And Process Freezer

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