Desktop
A user asked me why he can restart and his problems sometimes go away, and I want to give him a vert text-book type answer of what happens when you restart. How do problems come over time, and why the go away with a restart...
So the question is,"Why do we have to restart our computers?"
by xpertdragon
A simple answer would be that Often we use many programs during an entire uptime of a PC (the actual time it has been running before the last reboot or restart). Programs allocate memory (RAM/Virtual Memory) and hard drive space, during installs,write to the registry and so on.
More times than often, resources that contain these program files, don't always get along, conflicts arise...patches have to be created and applied to make everthing run smoothly again.
Overall, (Too late at this point for short and to the point) Initialization occurs on REBOOT, initialization of DLL's, VXD, and EXE's, and they can set things into a different set of motion each and every time.
Paul
by m.conlon
by b_pope
This is more a Window's problem, opensource OS's don't suffer from reboots like Window's systems.
Linux & Unix based systems allow you the ability to debug problems without the need for rebooting. All the running processes are more visible allowing you to just shut off the affending process & restart it, virtually eliminating reboots. With Window's it's difficult to determine what processes you can safely turn off & on again without causing more problems, whence the need to reboot to clear memory.
Microsoft XP has less reboot needs, than earlier 9X systems.
Rebooting doesn't really solve the problem, it will more often than not happen again under the same situation.
by m.conlon
by 7nt
It depends on the operating system you are using. Win95/98/98SE/ME are backward compatible to 16 bit programs. As such, they use two small 64KB heaps of memory called Resources (User and GDI) and these can't be increased. Once you've used up all your resources, your computer becomes sluggish and the only way to reset your resources is to reboot.
One of the problems is that some programs that use these resources don't always give back the resources they "borrowed" when needed and so eventually your resources will be exhausted.
These resources have nothing to do with how much RAM you have in your computer. They also don't apply to NT based operating systems like WinNT, Win2000 or WinXP.
The other reason you need to restart computers(inc. NT based systems) is when you install a new program, it writes to the registry and installs DLLs in your system. You then need to restart so that the operating system reads the new settings in the registry and finds the linked DLL files written in the registry.
clover
by m.conlon
by m.conlon
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