Know-It-All: Reboot!
A running joke featured in the British TV show, The IT Crowd, involves the members of the IT department responding to every computer problem with “have you tried turning it off and back on again?”. While the cry of “reboot your computer” is a common one in IT departments, the idea behind it is sound. Rebooting (turning your computer completely off, then back on) clears temporary memory and resets your computer’s RAM (Random Access Memory) back to empty.
Computers have two major types of memory – hard drives, which are big and slow, and RAM, which is smaller but faster. When you are working on a document on your computer, that document is loaded into the RAM because if you accessed the hard drive (where the document is permanently stored), there would be a noticeable delay between you hitting a key on your keyboard and that letter appearing on your screen.… Read the rest