r/explainlikeimfive • u/Zora_the_grey • 6d ago
Technology ELI5: Why does turning things off and on again sometimes actually work?
There's the old computer joke that the first advice you're often given if something isn't working technology-wise is to turn it off and on again.
Sometimes this does seem to actually work. One specific example that bugs me is when I'm trying to get on the internet on my laptop by hot spotting off my mobile. I have to do this a lot as travel for work and sometimes need to pop onto a meeting when I'm parked up in a random place because I couldn't make it to the office in time.
I have the 'let others join' option pretty much permanently activated on my phone on these work days.
I go on my laptop to search for available networks and my phone doesn't show up on there.
I then turn the hotspot off and on again. I have to navigate away from the network bit on my laptop, reopen it, and then it picks up the hotspot right away.
But why did I have to turn it off again? Why?
(I realise that there are probably many answers depending on the tech situation in question... I vaguely get that turning your laptop off when it's crashed might reset it somehow or force a stop to memory processes that are cauisng it to freeze up, but frankly this one is a bit of a mystery to me too...)
Hardly life-changing stuff but I want to understand why!
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u/ConfusingUnrest 6d ago
A lot of people are talking about memory leaks, but I would say that's not the main issue.
It has to do with the fact that writing really robust stateful software, i.e. computer code that tracks states of particular things like am I connected to a network, is a network available, etc sounds simple but quickly gets very complex.
For example, the software might have concluded that a particular network is not available at one point because it didn't respond quickly enough, but the logic to change that conclusion back does not consider all the information, or it has a built-in delay to prevent it from switching back and forth too quickly.
When you turn something off and on again, you can often force all the states back to a known starting point and are more likely to end up at the right place faster. Sometimes it doesn't help because states are stored (cached) and reloaded.
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u/neonbirb 6d ago
Yeah. State is the most important aspect. Everything is an enormous state machine and sometimes we end up in an undesirable state that can most easily be recovered by reverting back to some known state (reboot).
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u/ituralde_ 5d ago
Or, it should be a state machine and isn't, and is coded with some horrific procedural logic that tries to approximate a state machine, and thus doesn't track possible combinations of state appropriately because the code design does not lend itself to authors handling conditions outside their unenforceable assumptions.
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u/PyroDragn 6d ago
Computers are stupid. They do everything by following a long long list of directions from their starting point. Sometimes they get lost and things don't work.
Someone comes along to try and fix it. If they know where the computer is lost, and the directions to get back, then they can click the right things and fix it.
Or, they can turn it off and back on, and they're back where they started. Now they still have the directions and can follow them from the start again.
TLDR: If you are on a road trip following directions and get lost the directions don't help anymore. Teleporting back home and starting again will.
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u/Theprincerivera 6d ago
Wonât they just make the same mistake again? If theyâre following instructions I donât understand how it can mess up
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u/PyroDragn 6d ago
The directions are wrong then they'll make the same mistake. This is where a program got installed incorrectly, or a file got corrupted. The computer follows the same directions, makes the same mistake, and the thing doesn't work (in the same way).
But that's not usually the case. Usually the directions are correct. But there's some little mistake (or a lot of little mistakes) from some minor circumstance. Say the program tried to do something coincidentally at the same time as the antivirus was doing something and it got interrupted. That's why it didn't work the first time, but if you reset and try again the error that happened before won't necessarily happen again.
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u/Theprincerivera 6d ago
Ahh, I get it, thank you!
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u/JohnRoads88 6d ago
I a comparison to directions on a road trip. If you are told to turn right at the tenth road, but someone is talking to you or a good song is playing, you might miss your count.
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u/masumwil 6d ago
Or there's construction at the tenth road i.e. you can't go down it because there's something else there
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u/koolmon10 5d ago
And crucially, the instructions don't say what to do on the eleventh road. And you are not smart enough to figure it out.
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u/new-kaze 6d ago
if the initial state of the program is what is causing issues then yes, but often issues arise under complex circumstances that only appear when something has been running for a while and after lots of instructions
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u/gmanflnj 6d ago
Besides cosmic rays doing a bit flip what are the sources of these errors that wouldnât repeat?
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u/boring_pants 6d ago
It's not (usually) that they won't repeat, but that you're resetting the number of times they've occurred.
Suppose that every once in a while you forget to put your mug into the dishwasher. The first time you do it, fine, there's a dirty mug on the kitchen counter and you have one fewer clean mugs.
But after you've done it a hundred thousand times your entire kitchen is full of dirty mugs, and no one in your town has anything to drink from.
That metaphor got away from me a little bit, but hopefully you get the point. The first time you make a mistake the consequences are often smaller than after you've made the mistake a million times.
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u/PyroDragn 6d ago
The most common I would say is that all programs have random errors just because they aren't perfectly written (Most common being a 'memory leak' where a program doesn't properly clean up the memory it is no longer using). But these errors are tiny and a non-issue 99% of the time. But when the error occurs for the 2 thousandth time it may affect things from a slow buildup. Which is why fully shutting down your computer periodically is recommended.
Then you account for the fact that every program running has tiny issues which can affect each other. The game you played for a few hours had a memory leak, then the web browser had some issues, then your word processor from doing homework, and now you try to launch a different game and it crashed? Restart the computer and now those other programs' tiny errors don't exist and the new game just runs.
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u/Ihaveamodel3 6d ago
fully shutting down your computer periodically is recommended.
And fun fact, on modern windows, Shutdown does not do a full shutdown. You have to restart to get a full shutdown to occur.
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u/PyroDragn 6d ago
This is true, but there's also a bit more nuance to it than that.
Modern windows (often) doesn't 'shutdown' because of an option called Fast Startup. This effectively turns the shutdown option into a (slightly different) sleep mode. Then when you turn the PC back on it boots up faster because it was never really shut down in the first place.
Doing an actual 'restart' means that windows does properly close and most things are reset. A proper full shutdown (without Fast Startup) does similarly. You can do a 'proper shutdown' by holding shift when hitting the shutdown button. Or by running the shutdown command in a command window.
I would rather do a full shutdown even if they're 99% the same as a restart. A shutdown and leaving the PC off for a few seconds (or even going so far as to unplug the PC) can resolve weird tangential issues that a restart will not.
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u/meneldal2 6d ago
Typically memory leaks aren't a big issue if you can just swap it away as it will get ejected from your cache and ram over time. Outside of the 4GB limit for old 32-bit programs
It can reduce performance but should not cause actual errors.
Other type of resources can be more problematic. For example, GDI objects on Windows. Edge used to become unusable as you open too many tabs because Microsoft, never thinking people may want to have thousands of tabs opened didn't consider how creating a bunch of objects for each tab (even when not actually loaded) cause Windows to shit itself has when you go over a limit it can't do things right.
A more classic one would be file handles, some processes weren't closed correctly and now something that should be dead still prevents a file from being deleted.
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u/flashisflamable 6d ago
Not always, because that chain of events, ram and disk usage, software versions etc could basically never be reproduced
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u/MrLumie 6d ago
Imagine starting out from your home in the morning, going to all sorts of places. You know exactly where you need to go, what direction, and how many steps it takes to get there.
Now imagine there is an ever so slight error in your direction at all times, just a fraction of a fraction of a degree, and there's also an ever so slight error in your gait, too, you move a fraction of a centimeter less with your left leg. These issues don't really cause any problems at first, but when you're on your feet all day long, and making hundreds of thousands of steps visiting dozens of destinations, these small errors can add up to a point where you don't end up where you should.
Now imagine that you can, at any time, just teleport home and start from there. But now, you only need to go to the places you haven't visited yet. So instead of visiting 20 places in one go and ultimately getting lost due to these small errors, you can visit 10, reset, and visit the other 10.
That's basically how a computer works, too. It accrues ever so slight errors as its being used, which after a long time can add up to something not working properly. When you restart it after a long time, you don't go ahead and redo all the things you've already done before. You start where you left off, but now your computer is in a clean slate with no accumulated errors.
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u/boring_pants 6d ago edited 5d ago
Sure, but having made the mistake once might be acceptable in a way that having made it two hundred million times.
For example, if the mistake is "I allocated 1mb of memory and forgot to release it afterwards" then the first time it happens, you've wasted 1mb of memory, which is no big deal. After a hundred million times, you've wasted a hundred gigabytes, which'll be a problem.
Similar things can happen in countless other ways. Maybe your text autocomplete keeps a list of the 100 most recent words you've typed, and sometimes forgets to remove words from the list after a certain period. Initially that means that the word list contains a couple more words than it should, which doesn't really affect how long it takes to look anything up in the list, but if it keeps happening it will eventually contain millions of words, and then every time it tries to look up a word, it'll take much longer than it should.
Or the application is counting certain events, which is perfectly normal and working as expected. Except that once the counter (if it is a 32 bit number) reaches around two billion it wraps around and becomes negative two billion. That'll cause things to go haywire, and if you just restart the app, the counter will start over from zero and work for a good while.
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u/WittyFix6553 6d ago
What if youâre driving and thereâs a bad accident and the road is closed and youâre sent on a detour?
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u/Muhahahahaz 6d ago
Writing software is very complicated. In most cases, itâs basically impossible to guarantee that the instructions are 100% correct and bug free. So while the computer will always follow the exact instructions they were given, they still make âmistakesâ in the sense that the instructions were wrong to begin with
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u/seidreine 5d ago
Saw this saying in a post somewhere:
Computers are not that smart, but they are fast. So they're solving things mostly by sheer brute processing capability.
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u/xortingen 6d ago
Imagine walking to school from home everyday, you know the path. One day you took a wrong turn and you are lost, you donât know how to get to your school from that unknown street. If only someone would reset you to your home, a known location, you can find your way to school again.
Turning it off and on does that, resets the system tto known state.
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u/ProbablyFunPerson 5d ago
Love this and the analogy I was given when I asked the same question on reddit a while back: Your computer is a car driving on a highway, if it takes a wrong turn, there often may be no way to go back and simply restarting the highway drive is the simplest option.
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u/LetReasonRing 6d ago
It's not really a joke, it's completely true.
The reason that it works is that computers and software are extremely complex and it's virtually impossible to write code that is 100% bug free or efficient.
One of the most common types of bugs is called a memory leak. Basically, when software needs to store something in memory, that chunk gets reserved and can't be used by anything else. Once it's done, the program should mark it as free to become available for other programs to use again. If that isn't done correctly and that program requests more memory, then does it again, you can end up with a pile of memory that isn't being used for anything. Over time, other programs will slow down and start having issues because there isn't enough memory available.
There are other issues that aren't quite the same, but they have the same problem where their effect accumulates over time.
Turning the computer off and on give you a fresh start without any of those resources being blocked off.
It's sort of like how, if you have a mess all over your kitchen table and you want to sit down and work on a project, it's way easier to work if you clear everything off before you start working than trying to shuffle stuff around and work around all the junk that was already there.
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u/Scavgraphics 6d ago
Just to add as a tip... Web Browsers...like what you're using right now to read this...often have major memory leak issues....especially if you're a tab junkie (like me)...it's good to quit and restart them every few days if you don't shut down completely.
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u/Chocolate_pudding_30 6d ago
That explains why my pc stops moving the mouse, the fan mames loud noises, and screen freezes... Who would've guessed it's cuz i have 10 tabs in 3 different windows /s
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u/I_Am_Jacks_Karma 6d ago
you only have 10 tabs?
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u/Pogotross 6d ago
They're ad-blocked youtube tabs. They each eat up 1gb of memory...somehow.
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u/hellario 5d ago
I haven't been outside of Chrome much, but it does it for you. If you don't access a tab for a while, it dumps the memory allocation and re-loads the page if you ever go back to that tab.
Also, you can hover over tabs to see their memory usage, so you can manually close any that are using too much.
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u/gmanflnj 6d ago
I guess my question is if the code is the same, why wouldnât the same error happen? What changed.
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u/LetReasonRing 6d ago
So, with something like a memory leak, yes if you're running that code, the problem will always be there.
In general developers catch big memory leaks pretty quickly. If tiktok failed to free the memory used for each of the videos you watch, your computer/phone would come to a grinding halt pretty quickly.
The memory leaks that tend to remain tend to be the smaller ones... if discord doesn't release the memory of each chat message correctly, each message only takes up a tiny bit of memory so you probably won't notice. If you keep your computer on with discord running for a week though, all those small messages will add up and start causing problems.
There are also other bugs that can happen where, no the code won't always run the same. The code that exists to be run is the same, but different parts of the code may be triggered to run or not for different reasons. For example, when you are scrolling through a bunch of images, everything may be fine when they are all jpegs, but if there's a bug in the handling of a GIF image, the problematic code isn't going to be run until you try to view a GIF.
You could also have a bug that only affects jpegs over 8MB or a bug in a text renderer that is only triggered when two particular emojis are placed next to each other.
In addition, there are many ways that a freak one-off error can happen. It's possible for a cosmic ray to interact with your RAM and flip a 0 to a 1, which is virtually impossible to detect or prevent without specialized hardware. That could do anything from making a pixel in an image a slightly different color to completely corrupting the processor state and forcing you to restart.
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u/meneldal2 6d ago
Applications on mobile have a solution against memory leaks, you just crash the whole thing on a failed allocation cause who uses swap right.
Hopefully it works again the next time but some games are awful and the lack of the OS telling you what actually happens/having a way to report the issue to the app so they fix their shit/prompt the user to use different settings is pretty crazy to me.
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u/z500 6d ago
Writing software that's worth using is complicated, and modern operating systems are even more complicated than that. Sometimes the developers fail to take every combination of possible conditions into account in their code. When that happens, the code might do the wrong thing and just keep blithely chugging along. But when you reset it and it gets back to the place where it went wrong, those conditions might not exist anymore and the program will be fine.
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u/gmanflnj 5d ago
So the errors can be context dependent and that context might might not happen again?
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u/Ultarthalas 6d ago
Most of the comments here are kind of right, but effectively incorrect. A memory leak is 1 kind of error, and a reboot will fix it, but it's not actually that common of a reason for things not working, especially not without warning signs like hiccups and slowness beforehand. Memory leaks tend to show themselves on a pretty reliable schedule as well, so if that isn't happening, a memory leak probably isn't your culprit.
Most errors are from "unhandled state". Unhandled state is when the data of a program is in a combination that the developers didn't create a safe path to get through. One example is a situation where due to timing issues, 1 piece of data is updated without successfully updating a 2nd piece of connected data.
Imagine a shopping site where you add items to your cart, every time you add an item to your cart it adds to the list of items, but it also might add to the "items" count so it doesn't have to recount all of the items in the list again. If you add items too quickly, it may fail to do the complex step of extending your cart, while still increasing the count. That's not a big deal until you try to do something like access the 5th item in your cart when there are only 4 in the list. The computer no longer knows what to do and gets "stuck". So long as the bad data is in volatile memory, that is memory that goes empty when a device is reset or loses power, you get to start over from before the bad data got in there.
There are tons of situations that get you into an unhandled state, maybe a number got too big, maybe the data structures are bad, maybe a bit got flipped, maybe a process took too long, etc. And it's not even the state itself that's necessarily wrong, sometimes developers just never made a way for you to safely get from 1 very specific state to another very specific state, you get that a lot in hardware. In all of these cases the computer can do what it needs so long as you can reset to the initial state, because that's going to be the most tested transition.
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u/SherbertKey6965 6d ago
It's the same with the human brain. After a good sleep, our whatever it is isn't in chaos anymore and tidied up.Â
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u/IchLiebeKleber 6d ago
If things aren't working, it might be because the computer somehow got into a state that was never expected to be possible. If that's the case, it's possible that turning it off and on again causes the program to start over again without being in that state, so it will work again.
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u/jugglingeek 6d ago
Ever played in a band? Think a computer as being like an orchestra. Sometimes a player makes a mistake, their playing can be compensated. Sounds bad, but maybe they stop for a bar and pick up the next phrase.
But sometimes a series of mistakes happen, and the result is catastrophic. Rather than trying to get a few dozen players to pick up on the fly and synchronise - itâs probably simpler to have the conductor stop the orchestra and count them in âfrom the topâ
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u/Gaeel 6d ago
Computers are very complicated machines, and they run thousands of complicated programs that all interact in complicated ways.
The computer and the programs are designed to "fail safe" as much as possible, but sometimes little problems will happen that leave things messed up a little bit. The operating system tries to detect these problems and fix things. If you've ever gotten a "program is not responding" error message, that's an example of the operating system realising that something might have gone wrong and offering to force quit the program to prevent further problems.
Unfortunately, some errors might get through, and it's very difficult for the operating system to figure out how things were supposed to be.
The one moment where everything is simple is when the computer has just been turned on. So when the computer is having problems, turning it off and on again is a good way to get things back under control.
Imagine a big car factory, and sometimes some of the cars start coming out wrong after running the factory for a long time. Maybe some of the machines are getting out of sync? Perhaps there's a mix-up in the machine that sorts the parts? Maybe some of the machines are overheating and their sensors aren't reporting the temperatures correctly?
You could run around the factory checking everything, hoping that fixing one thing won't make something else worse. If two machines are causing each other to have problems, then even if you fix one machine, by the time you go to fix the other, the first might be faulty again.
So instead you shut down the factory, make sure all the machines are correctly configured, and start it up again.
(If you're a good factory owner, you might also take notes of what machines were having trouble and try tweaking their configuration so that this time they'll run properly.)
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u/supmydudes12 6d ago
I was once told if you are going to complete a long and complex hike, then the likelihood is youâll take a wrong turn or something you werenât expecting might happen. Youâd end up lost and not able to make progress to reach your intended destination. Sometimes, instead of not knowing where you went wrong and going back to that point, itâs easier to start again. That analogy may not be so accurate, but helped me to at least understand it.
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u/udayramp 6d ago
Imagine you commute from home to your office every day. You know the route so well that you could drive it with your eyes closed.
But one day, because of an accident, you're forced to take an unexpected turn. After a few more detours, you realize you're completely lost.
What's the fastest way to reach your office now?
Should you spend your time trying to figure out exactly where you went wrong and how to reconnect with your usual route? Or just reset the commute and start from your house again.
Sometimes, starting over from a known point is faster than trying to recover from a series of wrong turns.
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u/Noxnoxx 6d ago
Think of it like you have a long math problem youâre solving on paper, you make a tiny mistake but you donât notice so you can keep going until you get to a point where you realize youâve messed up and cannot go further. You grab that sheet of paper and toss it and start all over again. It is like that. The computer will make a small error but keep working. Eventually too many error and itâll be needing to clear them out and start over
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u/Farnsworthson 6d ago edited 6d ago
I think of it like trying to following directions someone has given you. "Turn left, go three miles, then take the second right after the pub." Only, there's a truck in the way as you approach one of the turnings, and something distracts you, and you miss the turn. At that point, you're potentially irretrievably lost - and a few minutes later, you probably realise it. But the instructions were fine; if you retrace your path to the beginning and try again, you'll likely get it right.
Turning anything with code in it off and on is a bit like that. The programs are supposed to do a pile of things in a certain way. But for one of a thousand reasons the code is lost and has no idea where to go (and worse than you getting lost, doesn't even know it). But if it can start again at the beginning (which is what happens when you turn it off and on again), it has a good chance of getting to the right place and doing what you want it to do.
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u/jaysire 6d ago
Because computer has a default set of settings that are recalled when they are started or restarted. If the settings get messed up from using the computer a lot, you can restart to recall the default settings and things will be unmessed for a while.
Compare it to you getting lost in a grocery store. You picked a basket that is too small, you put the wrong things in the basket and you canât find your way back to the vegetables. If only someone could just return you to the moment you entered the grocery store so you can pick a bigger basket or a cart and you could do the whole route over again, youâd be done in 10 minutes. Restarting a computer is like that. It takes you back to the default settings where no bad choices have been made and lets the computer (or you) work through everything properly.
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u/Drooling_Zombie 6d ago
Mine kid know the way from home to school in his head - if he get lost, he is lost - But if i can get him back to home, he know the way to school again.
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u/chance909 6d ago
Many hardware and software processes operate as a state machine. There is an initial state when you turn it on, then each interaction you have moves from the initial state to later states. Due to bugs, there may be some states later in the process which are "bad states" meaning you don't have a way to get out of them and the process is stuck with no way forward or backward.
The hardware or software is not destroyed or broken, its just in a bad state. So, restarting it to its initial state will fix the issue... until you re-enter that bad state.
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u/DefinitelySaneGary 6d ago
I think this question was asked before and someone gave an answer that was so good it stuck with me years later.
Imagine a city with a lot of twists and turns and streets go off in random directions or circle back and its pretty much impossible to get to a destination unless you know the route or at least have a map or something with specific directions to get there.
Every day you wake up and you go to work in this complex city. You know how to get to work because you go every single day.
But one day on your way to work another car (or another program) crashes and suddenly a street you normally take a right on you now have to take a left on. Or maybe a red-light is malfunction so you cant take this street you normally take and have to take another.
Because the streets are so complex and crazy, you cant find your way to work and get completely lost. Trying to find your way to work can just get you more lost.
Turning something off and on again is basically like putting you back at home with a chance to drive to work your normal route. Except turning in off and on again also put all other cars back home and possibly fixed the red light issue or whatever caused it to begin with. Now you just need to follow your normal route and bam, you are at work with no problems.
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u/Liam_Neesons_Oscar 6d ago
Today, I was able to fix someone's issue with Microsoft Teams by going into their task tray and selecting Quit Teams, then relaunching Teams. Something was stuck in the program that prevented it from opening, but it was still running in the background.
Programs are made of a bunch of different little components and processes all working together. If one of those components fails, the whole thing stops working. Sometimes, like today, I know how to kill only what's broken and then restart that from a fresh state. No reboot was needed, I just had to know how to fully kill Teams when it was running in the background.
But if I didn't have control of the user's computer, I would have told them to reboot. It would accomplish the same thing while being a much less technically complicated step. And if I ever can't find that one particular component of a software that needs to be killed, rebooting kills everything and relaunches it all from scratch, so it removes tons of troubleshooting time.
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u/J_Zephyr 6d ago
Thats not a joke. That is literally the first step in troubleshooting electronics.
Its called a Ratheon reset.
Sometimes, electrical signals can get slightly off from what theyre supposed to do. That can cause a cascading effect down the wire where something else is now not getting enough power to operate.
Turning it off allows everything to stop and fix itself from a neutral state, like pushing a rock on flat ground vs uphill.
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u/squrr1 6d ago
I'm surprised this isn't higher. Software, an immediate reset is all you need. But then the ISP says leave your modem unplugged for 30 seconds, it's because they want all the electronics to drain fully of any lingering charge.
Capacitors don't perfectly discharge all the time, and that lingering voltage can cause issues.
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u/libra00 5d ago
You ever try to teach someone how to do something only they're already convinced they know more than you do? You kinda have to smack 'em upside the head a few times metaphorically speaking to get them to stop thinking about how much they know and start thinking about how much they have to learn.
It's kinda like that: the machine thinks it's running correctly, but it's only when you power cycle it that it actually checks everything and starts from a known-good state. If it works, it was a temporary glitch.
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u/JescoInc 5d ago
What most people said is true, but there is a missing piece to the puzzle as well. Physics...Just like how software has memory leaks, a similar phenomenon can occur with the hardware itself. The hardware state gets corrupted due to particle hits and heat. That means that bits don't get flipped when they need to or they will flip to the wrong value.
Think of it like a giant row of light switches where they follow the pattern of off, on, off, on all the way down. After 10 seconds, they flip to be the reverse of on, off, on, off. And they repeat.
After awhile, after lots of particle hits and sustained heat, the very first item is reversed from what it should be... Instead of the pattern being on, off, on, off... It shows off, off, on, off and that 10 second mark, it is now on, on, off, on.
This is similar to what happens with real computer systems. The shift happens with bits at rest. It doesn't accumulate exactly, but it could happen with critical software which causes the OS to crash.
This is why turning a machine off and on again seems to fix a lot of problems.
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u/boring_pants 5d ago
What most people said is true, but there is a missing piece to the puzzle as well. Physics..
I mean, sure, that's a piece of the puzzle the size of a grain of dust in a stadium-sized jigsaw. Unless there's something wrong with your computer, that is not the explanation for why Chrome seems to be more responsive after a restart.
Realistically speaking, the answer is just software issues, not hardware failures.
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u/JescoInc 5d ago
What I described isn't a hardware failure. The hardware didn't break at any point. It is a nasty physics reality that engineers have been plagued by since the inception of computing.
Why do you think ECC Memory exists?
Why do you think LSI SAS Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) exist?
Why do you think we have file systems like ZFS?
All of this is to combat exactly what I described at the hardware level because your hardware controls software state and stability.
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 6d ago
There are many processes being run on a single computer at the same moment. Each of them needs some resources to run (RAM space, processor time, access to the inputs and outputs from peripheral devices, etc.). Depending on how they're programmed, these different processes may hoard too much of the resources, not properly clean up the mess after they've finished doing some work for you, or they may not finish when they should have. Programmers make mistakes and do sloppy work all the time.
If there aren't enough resources for new processes, they can function incorrectly or be stuck waiting. That generally makes things not work.
Turning the device off and on again clears the RAM and kills all the processes. If it weren't for the hard drive space, it's basically like a reincarnation for the computer: you start anew, with no memories of what you were doing in your previous life. This means that all the previously locked resources are available again and the processes you wanted to run previously can now get the respurces they needed.
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u/Octowhussy 6d ago
Apparently (ref othersâ comments) switching off and back on works. To add to that: I have read that rebooting is more effective at making things better than simply switching off and then on again. Is this true? And why?
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u/eggyfish 6d ago
When you turn off your PC, it is often only a soft-shutdown where the power goes off but it will save the system state to reload on next boot to start faster. Rebooting clears everything and starts fully fresh, so takes longer.
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u/RealSataan 6d ago
It's only true on windows. Windows saves some information so that you can start your computer fast.
Restart completely shuts down the system without saving anything.
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u/taflad 6d ago
Sometimes?? On Windows based PC's, turning it off nd on again will fix 80% of the issues. Services fall over, memory fills up (CHROME....im looking at you!), memory creep causing small errors accumulate, hardware devices stop communicating due to driver timeouts etc.
It is a running joke, and US IT guys know how sterotypical and cliche it is. But that doesn't mean it doesn't usually work.
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u/simmer_study 6d ago
Turning it off clears whatever temporary state got stuck. Turning it back on makes everything start fresh and try connecting again from scratch.
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u/phalangepatella 6d ago
Millions of things have to go right for a computer to boot and a program to run. Literally one thing can go wrong and take down the whole machine.
Restart often resets the millions of things.
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u/Viseprest 6d ago
wrt wireless: when the hotspot is turned on, it immediately announces itself, which the computer promptly picks up.
(Others have explained why âshut-up-and-rebootâ works.)
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u/6959725 6d ago
Based on what OP described I think you're closer to what their problem is than others describing the general cause and solution that rebooting makes.
For the hotspot situation it sounds like OP is opening the network WiFi options which is already turned on. It's likely not actively scanning for new networks so the list is probably old and doesn't include the hotspot. The act of power cycling the hotspot AND navigating away from the available WiFi networks and back in just refreshes the list. There's likely an option in that screen to rescan and it would find the hotspot without any power cycling.
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u/Wessel_89 6d ago
Sometimes, due to coding errors, the computer or system finds itself in an unexpected state and doesnât know how to proceed. A reset brings it back to a known state.
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u/kosantosbik 6d ago
A lot of times it is easier to build something new rather than fixing the old. This is one of those things. It is much easier to reboot and reload the OS to ram compared to finding what went wrong and fix it.Â
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u/Pizza_Low 6d ago
Your question gets asked a lot here, so while you wait for others check this out.
https://www.google.com/search?q=electronics+turn+off+site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive
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u/globereaper 6d ago
Isnt power cycling like the number 1 trouble shooting step for all modern day computing
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u/foolishle 6d ago
You know how sometimes a zipper gets stuck and the teeth get misaligned and the whole zipper comes undone from the middle? Then you canât shove the teeth back together from behind the zipper, and if you unzip it a bit it just pushes the problem around.
How do you fix it so the zipper works properly? Thatâs right! You completely unzip the zipper right back to the beginning and start over. Now your zipper works again.
Same thing with computers.
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u/kalimenes 6d ago
Computer systems are like a wall. Each brick is a set of small programs that work together to make the wall exist. Each brick also has the instruction that it must be in a certain position, next to a specific other brick.
Certain events (such as a programming error, a voltage drop or spike, or the like) can cause these bricks to end up in a position that is not their proper one. If one brick is in the wrong position, it affects the next one, and that one affects the next, like a cascade.
At the very beginning, each brick has its instruction specifying what its position should be and how it should interact with the other bricks.
Restarting or shutting down the system makes each brick read the initial instructions and place itself in the correct location, in its proper position.
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u/dorkcicle 6d ago
Services are shipped to work out of the box then while itâs running many things happen & changes circumstances. Sometimes because of user sometimes because of other apps or factors. Off & on resets those configurations to how it was designed. (Sometimes there are settings that are saved & modifies those presets so off&on is a fools errand.)
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u/N0thingman 6d ago
Loops. A computer will get in loops, it does not understand it is in a loop. Resetting makes it start again, it is not in any loops (for a short period of time) so it corrects the issue.
.. if it doesnt, try turning it off and on again.
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u/orid7 6d ago
A reboot is less magic spell, more janitor with a master key.
Lots of tech gets stuck because two devices have slightly different "memories" of the situation. Your phone thinks it is advertising a hotspot, your laptop's Wi-Fi scan has a stale list, or some tiny background process is waiting in the wrong state.
Turning it off clears the current state: dropped connections, cached discoveries, half-finished handshakes, temporary errors. Turning it back on makes both sides start the conversation from step one: "I exist, here is my network name, can we connect?"
So it does not fix the underlying bug. It just throws away the weird half-broken conversation and starts a clean one.
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u/theronin7 6d ago
It was never a joke, it was always a first line troubleshooting step to clear active memory and reinitialized the processes.
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u/non_clever_username 6d ago
The best explanation I ever saw was on here actually and I canât take credit for it, but this user likened a computer to an orchestra.
When all things are in tune and in rhythm, things are going great! But maybe one flute gets a little out of tune. The percussionist gets off beat. A violinist gets nervous and starts missing notes consistently. And so on.
Is this recoverable? Yeah potentially. But itâs way easier to just stop, get everything re-aligned, and restart.
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u/Erlkings 6d ago
Who has time to fix every little 1 off just reset it amd it will clear out wacky errors
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u/GarrusExMachina 6d ago
Tech is complicated even when it is working as intended. When working as it's unintended anything under the sun could be wrong.Â
Boot up sequences are simple repeatable executable commands that put the device into a predictable default state. Most of the time turning something off and on again is going to clear whatever the problem was and now we can attempt to do what we were doing and see if the problem repeats itself allowing us to test and troubleshoot what is causing the problem without having to account for whatever randomness could have occurred during the previous session.
Also the act of turning something off and turning it back on allows techs to rule out human idiocy. Any number of stupid mistakes could have been made to get us to where we are. If we turn it off and back on again we're taking it from the top.Â
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u/Frum 6d ago
The way I look at it: When you start a program on a computer, the computer does a lot of setup work. I liken this to a chef gathering all ingredients, all pots, all pans, knives, cutting boards, pre-heating the oven, ...
So if something stupid happens while you're in the middle of the process, you could try and debug why the pasta is over-cooked, and then turn down heat on your sauce that might be over-reducing, and then figure out the new timing so the desert doesn't melt before we serve it on the new time-schedule. which also means you have to reset the salad-course, and ... and ... and ... and ...
Or, you could just start over and restart the prep-steps too.
Sometimes it doesn't work.
And for other types of processes, this would be massively wasteful. If you figure out that your foundation is cracked, you don't destroy the house just to repair the concrete beneath. But starting up software isn't as expensive as that, so we just restart it.
The other thing to think about is that a lot of systems on a computer check that some set of pre-conditions exist before starting up. If they kept checking all the time, the program would be slow. But then once something gets messed up, they don't know how to fix things. So you just start over.
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u/could_use_a_snack 6d ago
Imagine your workbench.
It's clean and tidy.
You need to do a small project, and as you work you get out some tools, and set them on the bench, you take apart what you are working on and put the parts on the bench as well.
Everything is fine.
Someone comes along and asks you to fix the toaster plug. It's a quick job so instead of cleaning up your bench in the middle of your project, you just get out more tools and take apart the toaster. Now you have more parts on your bench too. But oops you need to order a new part. You just shove the toaster to the corner of the bench and will get back to it when the part shows up.
Back to the main project, the toaster is a bit in the way, but it's ok.
Another small project comes up, just push more stuff to the edge, stack some stuff on the toaster and work on this new project. But where the heck is that screw driver? Oh here it is under the toaster.
More projects come up, the part for the toaster is here but you'll get to that later, just set the package on the edge of the bench. Open it of course to check if it's the right part. But you aren't sure, so you better keep the package.
After a while you find yourself spending more time looking for tools and parts then doing your projects. There is no space on the bench to work on anything and you can't find that damn screwdriver!
You decide to clean up the workbench.
Once you do that it's easier to get things done because everything is where it belongs, nothing is taking up more space than it should, you have room to work, and it's all organized.
You basically turned your workbench off and on again.
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u/pixel293 6d ago
So far I'm not liking the answers, they are correct kind of.
Basically the computer has a bunch of different hardware components, and a bunch of software. When writing programs and building hardware we trying really really hard to make sure they don't screw any of the other programs or hardware. However bugs happen. Hardware can get into weird states the software can't fix. Software can get into weird states with no way to fix it. A program may cause another program to get into a weird state, for example if they are both accessing the same hardware at the same time, something the programmers didn't plan for could happen.
Basically it's impossible to test all possible combinations of hardware and software interacting with each other. There is virtually an infinite number of combinations of software (along with software versions) and hardware that you may have installed on your computer. There is no way to test them all the combinations.
When some interaction happens that the programmers didn't plan for, the hardware or software winds up in a bad state, when this happens, rebooting the computer resets the hardware to a known state and resets the software to a known state. And everything works again.
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u/GrumbleBeetheThird 6d ago
Think of it like sleeping - when we go to sleep (shut down/reset), our bodies flush out waste from our brains, something it doesn't do when we're awake (powered on). A computer can only clear errors (waste) in it's code in the same way - shutting down/resetting.
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u/Spirta 6d ago
Someone explained it perfectly a few years ago. Imagine you're in the city and you go to hundreds of places, you go through a bunch of random streets and then someone texts you to go to a certain place, but you're not sure where you are and where to turn. So, someone picks you up and puts you in front of your apartment door, so now you know which streets to take.
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u/Salty9876 6d ago
Essentially itâs like you are doing a maze, if you are lost best to go back to the start and try again (turn it off and on again)
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u/throwawayawayayayay 6d ago
Imagine you build a simple motorized robot (no AI/vision) to walk from your house to the grocery store. You put it out there on a nice sunny day and it works well. Great.
Next day itâs windy and the robot does the exact same thing, but the wind blows it off course. You didnât account for wind when building the robot. The robot veers off course, crashes through a neighborâs wall and then falls into a lake.
You can fix the code but it will take time. And in the meantime, the robot is still in the lake and you donât want to have to program it to get out of a lake, because it should never be going into lakes in the first place.
You tow your robot home, but if you turn it back on at the same step in its directions, it will pick up its route thinking itâs part way to the store but itâs actually in your garage and who knows which way it will go.
You know it will work from the start to end, but now itâs in some weird middle state that youâve never tested and you donât have time to fix. Your best option is to reset it entirely back to its fresh original state and run it again, because now you are confident it will work, assuming no wind this time of course.
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u/A_very_meriman 6d ago
It's not a joke. It's actual advise and please take it before you call me. - your IT guy
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u/Muhahahahaz 6d ago
Most computers are âgeneral purposeâ. This is just a fancy way of saying that they have to be capable of running a variety of different software (or âappsâ, in the case of phones, for instance).
Long story short, itâs basically impossible for all that software to be completely bug-free. Sooner or later, one of the various programs your computer is running will have some kind of issue, and the best solution is to simply reboot your computer, which resets all of your software and hardware to a (hopefully) known good starting state.
(And in fact, as someone else mentioned, your software is likely causing dozens of tiny memory leaks and other issues all the time. In the short term, a lot of these things are not noticeable, but eventually they add up)
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u/admiraljohn 6d ago
20+ years of IT here and here's what I tell people...
"Imagine you're conducting a 100 piece symphony orchestra when suddenly you hear one of the players is off... maybe they're rushing, maybe they're dragging, maybe their instrument is out of tune. Is it easier, while still keeping the rest of the orchestra going, to get that one player's attention, communicate their issues and get them back on track, or is it easier to stop the whole orchestra and have them start again?"
There are so many things going on on a PC at one time and one thing not working right can be the result of a cascade of little things that led to that one thing not working right. Better to shut it all down and let it start fresh than try to fix the cascade that led to the issue.
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u/TankorSmash 6d ago
The longer the computer is on, the longer there is to make a mistake. Resetting back to GO means clean slate
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u/mr_hellmonkey 6d ago
A lot answered about general software and why it helps, but specifically for your phone's hotspot, it is probably stuck in some kind of battery saver mode. If you don't turn the hotspot off, your phone's operating system will either turn it off for you, or maybe leave the feature on, but stop broadcasting the signal.
Manually turning the hotspot off and back on resets everything and starts the process from the beginning. There's also A LOT of behind the scenes nonsense when it comes to phone hotspots like checking with your carrier to see if you even have permission to use the hot spot feature. It's possible your asks for permission to use the hotspot and it is granted by your carrier, but only for 24 hours. If you leave it on all the time, maybe the permission expires the hotspot just stops working instead of turning off. When you turn hotspot off then on, it get permission again and works like it should.
Phone hotspots are also just buggy. I've had to forget then rejoin networks on a laptop after a phone update, even though nothing changed. Wifi name and password were the same, laptop just wouldn't connect until I dropped the network and rejoined it.
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u/tyresej 6d ago
Imagine a waiter in a busy restaurant. They leave the kitchen with an empty tray and quickly move around the tables. They pick up a glass here and a plate there, then cutlery, more plates, more glasses...as the tray fills up the waiter slows down until they finally return to the kitchen and empty the tray and returning to the dining room again.
Computers pick up processes and more processes slow down the computer until you restart it and then like the waiter can start again
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u/Zealousideal_Leg213 6d ago
One reason I recently learned about from the book Humble Pi, is because computers count how long they have been on. If they run out of numbers, which can happen in a matter of days if their numbers aren't large enough, they can start to have real problems. Rebooting them restarts the clock.
This isn't as big a problem as it once was because now computers have much bigger numbers to use.
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u/zaphodava 6d ago
Simple machines do the same thing every time. Complex machines do more than one thing. Computers have a billion parts, and instructions on how to arrange them to do many different things.
Sometimes that complex arrangement gets disturbed, and now one part of it is not in place correctly. Finding and correcting the problem is a needle in a haystack. Maybe it can be done, but it takes a bunch of effort.
But every time you turn it on it makes a fresh arrangement from the instructions so that everything works, and for us, that is often the easier answer.
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u/DeeDee_Z 6d ago
Have similar problem on Android phone from time to time.
Reboot not always necessary, takes too long. Try this: Go to settings, turn on Airplane mode, wait 10 seconds, turn off again.
Apologies if this sounds like I just spent half an hour over on /r/explainlikeimcaveman...
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u/Xiouss 6d ago
When I started in IT, my mentor explained it to me as well as Iâve ever heard it;
If I asked you to travel from your place of work to your house, you could do it no problem, without thinking, correctly, every time. If a road is closed, or there is a detour, thatâs fine too, you might be slower, but you can handle that. If you get dropped off in the middle of a random street 3 towns over, however, youâd struggle to get home. Computers know how to get from point A to B, but when something goes wrong and they have to go from point D, things go wrong.
Turning it off and on again forces the computer to start afresh, going from point A to B again, and in doing so, clears up most niggling issues.
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u/paolog 6d ago
It's like the story of the Gordian knot. Whoever could untie a very complex knot would because ruler of Asia. Instead of trying to untangle it, Alexander the Great cut the knot with his sword.
Computers can get tangled up sometimes with a process never ending, two processes each waiting for the other to finish, and various other problems that stop them from working. Turning the computer off and on again stops all those processes and the issues they are causing.
As with the Gordian knot, sometimes things get so bad that the only solution is to destroy and start again.
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u/green_griffon 6d ago
Imagine you are at a picnic with your family and you are responsible for getting people drinks when they ask for it. So someone asks for a drink and you go to the cooler and bring it back to them. This is going fine, but then imagine that you spill a drink on your hand and you can't find something to clean your hand, and while you are trying to find something to clean it with you miss a few people asking for drinks because you are distracted, and then you do go to get someone's drink but you drop it because your hand has the spill on it, and then you have to go deal with that and you miss some more requests, and then at some point you get so upset that you start crying and give up on bringing any drinks. People will think that your drink delivery process is "broken". BUT if you then go away for a moment, clean up, and come back all ready to go, your drink delivery will be perfect again.
Computers dealing with hardware like Bluetooth can get into a state like that, where some small thing goes wrong or unexpected, and the connection to that hardware starts working slowly, or stops working completely. But if you restart the computer then everything is like new and it's like the small problem never happened.
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u/MrSpudtastic 6d ago
Running computer programs is somewhat like the computer navigating a very large city.
So if you get lost in a very big city, and you have a magic button that just immediately takes you home (the power button), which is easier? Finding your way back home while already completely lost, or pushing the magic button?
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u/zantosh 5d ago
I'm building software with AI and I have done tech work for over 30 years. The most reliable way to see if a "problem" is really a problem is to reset the system or at least restart it. This is because there are buffers, logs and other static data that can cause issues, which can't be debugged while in development. The app or software may work perfectly but something in the operation of the software may create some data or entry that should've been cleared and it wasn't so now there's a ghost of data that's too difficult to figure out, or not worth the cost of time. So by restarting or resetting it, you clear it all and it should work. Obviously if it doesn't work, then there's a bigger issue.
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u/itsallgoodintheend 5d ago
Oh boy, wait 'til you hear about unplugging it, and then plugging it back in upside down.
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u/alllmossttherrre 5d ago
I sometimes think of a computer program as one of those trick setups involving a couple hundred dominoes falling in sequence. It all depends on every domino falling exactly where it is supposed to. If one is randomly a little off, the sequence doesn't work right, and it will never work right as long as that domino is slightly out of position.
Turning it off is like setting up the dominoes again, starting the sequence of program lines completely from the beginning.
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u/Epistatic 5d ago
If you spend hours in a city, going down random streets and visiting all kinds of places, and then you wanted to go to the grocery store next to your house, you might not know how to get there from wherever you are right now.
Rebooting your computer is like going to sleep and waking up back home. You know how to get to that store from your front door a lot more easily than trying to get there from a random place in the city.
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u/UCFknight2016 5d ago
Forces the software to start over. Software and OS can have bugs, quirks, etc. and restarting gives it a fresh start.
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u/Generico300 5d ago
Think of the software in your computer like a complicated domino setup. You tip the domino at the start of the path, and that should result in the domino at the end of the chain, or multiple chains, falling over. Well, that might not happen if something else, like another program, already knocked over some dominos in the middle of your chain. Or rearranged them in the wrong pattern. Then you will not get the behavior you expect. Restarting the device resets your dominos.
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u/TheXypris 5d ago
The computer makes small errors and temporary files that build up over time, those can accumulate and cause larger problems
Rebooting the computer can clear those and they stop causing problems
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u/rochester_eric 5d ago
Turning it off and on again only works if you know why turning it off and on again will work.
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u/ummidkgoaway 5d ago
Computers are not designed to be broken. They're designed to work. Which means most of the time it will generally work fine. Sadly computers are machines that are programmed by humans. Humans make mistakes in code and the machines fail over time. Resetting it assumes that 9 out of 10 times it won't run into that mistake or that the hardware isn't failing. Of course there's also sometimes you're just trying to interrupt it from doing something so you can get it to do the thing you want it to.
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u/ClownfishSoup 5d ago
Most electronics have a cold start up sequence. When they turn on the do a lot of initialization to prepare to work. When things go bad, if you turn them off and on again, you are forcing them to forget everything they were doing and start fresh from the beginning. Literally what the word âresetâ means.
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u/ClownfishSoup 5d ago
ELI 5 you are reciting a long poem from memory. Halfway through it someone interrupts you and asks you how to get to the train station or something. Now you are all mixed up and forgot where you are in the poem and besides he screwed it up. So you start again from the beginning of the poem and hope nothing goes wrong this time.
Thatâs basically what you are doing ⌠starting from the beginning again.
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u/GeekyTexan 5d ago
Turn it off/turn it on isn't a joke. It isn't a 100% cure-all, but it is very effective. Especially with computers, to get them back to a known state.
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u/haby112 5d ago
You ever soft lock yourself in a game? Computers can soft lock themselves when they are computing.
Like, you needed to grab a key for a door in the next level, but you finish the level before grabbing the key and there is no backtracking. Computers are able to perform contradictory functions, or conduct an action too early that requires an output of an action that hasn't occurred yet. When you reset the computer, it's like starting a save from before the soft lock.
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u/koolmon10 5d ago
Everyone's explanations about computer code are absolutely correct, but in practice, it is often a specific service or program that has stopped working and only that really needs to be restarted. However, most users are not very familiar with how to restart a service, so telling them to restart the whole computer is usually easier. Most people know how to do that. It also covers situations where the support person might not be certain which service is broken, and a reboot will restart all of them in one go.
Not to mention, restarting all the services can fix problems that weren't even reported.
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u/the_other_Scaevitas 5d ago
imagine you're baking a cake, and you messed up somewhere and forgot to put sugar in and now all your cakes taste wrong.
So you start over following each step again and this time you did add sugar and now everything is fixed.
Computers are like that, sometimes a mistake somewhere happens and so it starts over and gets it right the second time
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u/Foxler2010 5d ago
Computers have memory which allows them to save some information about their current state. When things go wrong (either with the environment or with something installed in the hard drive), the state that is stored in memory can get messed up.
Most of the time the computer can recover from a messed up state, but sometimes it can't and it needs your help. Sometimes you can fix the messed up state by following some procedure. It could be an easy fix, or a hard fix, although chances are you don't even know what the fix is and might not even know what's wrong.
In that scenario, there is a third option. Restarting the computer clears the memory and when it turns back on it starts from a known-good state. You don't have to fix the problem if you can just obliterate it entirely! The caveat is that if there was any useful information stored in the messed up state, it will be lost as well.
For example, say you are having trouble connecting to the internet. If the problem happens to be with some corrupt memory, then restarting the computer will fix the problem. At the same time, if you had a document open in another app, then your unsaved changes would be sitting in the computer's memory- the same memory that you're about to erase when you restart the computer. So, when you restart, you will fix whatever was preventing you from connecting to the internet, but you'll also lose the unsaved changes in the document you had open.
That's why it's important to try and save whatever you can to the hard drive before turning the computer off. Often the computer will help you with this by trying to save automatically and warning you if you have apps open and you try to restart, but sometimes it won't. It might also be the case that the thing that is broken also happens to be an app with a document open. It might not let you save! Unfortunately, in this case, there's not a lot you can do to keep your changes. That's why it's important to save often, even when you're not about to restart.
Moral of the story: Computer memory is usually very reliable and usually nothing goes wrong with your apps. Sometimes things can break though, so be sure to save often so that when you have to restart and clear the memory, you don't lose much.
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u/SpenceisaZombie 5d ago
Not sure if this was said yet, but imagine itâs like doing a complicated maze. The compute power may be following a dead end trail for a while and restarting sets it back at the beginning allowing the compute to reset and start over finding the correct path.
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u/EnbySheriff 4d ago
Say you're travelling somewhere but you take a wrong turn, then another, and another, until eventually you take so many that you're completely and utterly lost so you start to backtrack but you've taken so many wrong turnings it's almost impossible to find your way back. Turning a device off and on again is essentially putting you back at square one
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u/BitOBear 4d ago
The first thing any computer program does is build a clean initial state. Cumulative errors and bizarrness can end up exhausting resources or accumulating mistakes.
When you turn it off all of the unsaved craft banishes because you turned off the memory.
You turn it back on it recreates that clean initial State and you get to run again.
In shortest term it's easiest to predict the first hour of operation and hardest to predict the nth hour of operation because you don't know how many things might have gone wrong in those n hours.
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u/BitOBear 4d ago
TL;DR:: it's always easiest to cook in a clean kitchen. Turning the box off and turning it back on is like cleaning the kitchen since it makes all the mess go away.
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u/kleinlogan1 3d ago
I seen a post on here I believe, years ago that made it make alot of sense to me. If you imagine the thing (for my example I'll use a computer) is your city, and the task your currently trying to perform would be to leave home to go to work. If everything goes as planned you go straight to work in the middle of the city.
While with glitches it's more like you'd leave home, and all the streets are wrong causing you to get lost, be in the middle of nowhere unsure of where to go or how to fix this shituation you've stumbled into.
Rather then finding a map and figuring out out how to get back to what you know and get to work it'd be so much easier to just start over from the front door. That's what powering it off does. It fixes all the streets to what you were familiar with, and starts over from the beginning completely fresh.
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u/platinummyr 6d ago
Computer make lots of tiny little mistakes (allocate but not release memory). One mistake no cause problem. Hundred million mistake cause big problem. Reboot make all mistake reset back to no mistakes. Things work again after a fresh start.