Quite often the first thing that a diagnostic technician will ask you to do is reboot your computer. Why is that? Because rebooting works surprisingly often!
“It seems like every time I call the tech support line for my software, operating system, or even my broadband connection, the first thing out of the technicians mouth is “reboot”. Or worse yet, “Turn the power off for a while.” What does that have to do anything? And why does it work?”
It does seem like a bit of magic, doesn’t it? The computer’s acting up, you reboot it, and – poof – things are better again. At least for a while. It gets even weirder when you achieve the same effect just by shutting it all down and pulling the power cord for a while. Here is a neat explanation.
The fact is electronic components can sometimes get into an odd state, and as Jerry points out, power-cycling the equipment forces the equipment to reset and restart from a known good state.
The same is true for software.
Complicated software (and what software isn’t these days?) touches lots of things on your computer as it runs. The longer it runs, the more it touches. Memory is used, released, and fragmented. Same for the disk as programs open, read, and write local and temporary files. And then there’s the hardware … video cards, network hardware, other peripherals – they’re all being accessed continuously. The result is that any of those (perhaps even all of them) can end up in states that can cause problems.
Naturally, it “shouldn’t” be that way, and the inherent quality of the software and/or hardware plays a role, but the bottom line is that it happens. Hence, a “reboot”. It restores all the software to a known state.
Likewise with a “power-cycle” [switching off totally and then removing the power cable for 60 seconds]. It restores all the hardware to a known state.
Remember though that temporary files, installed files, registry changes, and more will remain. That’s why in some extreme cases, a reformat and reinstall can also be a recommended solution for some personal computers.
What about Routers? Like many devices these days, routers are actually small single-purpose computers. They have internal memory that the router uses to track various bits of information relating to the internet connections that traverse across it. And the longer the router runs, the more likely that memory might have a problem. It could be hardware related, or something in its internal software. In any case, it is a good idea to reboot a router every couple of months.
Quote from Bill E. ... IT Consultant
"I have been a computer consultant for 30 years and I an tell you that rebooting your computer every day is a really good idea. The most important reason has to do with “leaky” programs. when you start a program it will ask the Windows memory manager for a chunk of memory that it can use and call it’s own for as long as the program is running. Sometimes the program may ask the memory manager for additional space. If the program does not shutdown correctly the memory manager does not get the message that the chunk of memory it had allocated to that program is now available to other programs. That memory does not get returned to the “pool” of available memory that the manager can hand out when requested. There are many reasons that this can happen but the only way to get all of the available memory back under the control of the memory manager is to reboot.
So rebooting every day is a good idea."