[Closed] Turn it off then on again....

Yep. It's not just computers. My Garmin loses the heart rate monitor every now and then and turning it off and on "fixes" it. Even our induction hob needed turning off and on the other day.

It is a cliche for two reasons.
1)its handy for helpdesks to get rid of awkward callers since you get them to hang up whilst trying it.
2)it can work.

For 2 some of the more famous examples are patriot missiles and Boeing 787s. Both of which required turning on and off again after a fixed period. The patriots have been fixed not sure about the boeings.

Also one of our TVs

It just seems to have some kind of digital seizure multiple times a week that results in having to yank the plug out and then putting it back in a couple of minutes later.

boeings

Hopefully they remember before taking off!

I used to commute into London fairly regularly and sometimes you'd sit on the train while they rebooted it at Waterloo. That was odd. All tthe lights and background noise you hardly notice suddenly go off/stop and you're basically locked inside for a couple of minutes while it all wakes up again.

Sounds like a lot of my teenage romances.

And every bus ever made.
Drivers make jokes about it, but it’s simply amazing how often a reboot will fix a problem.

It's a very important skill on my Embraer 145. Works more often than not too.

memory leakage

I can't remember why that is the answer, but it is 😉

I can’t remember why that is the answer, but it is

Sometimes it is but it isnt always.
A common form of memory leakage is when a object isnt disposed off once it is no longer needed. Take a website which creates a new session object everytime someone interacts with it. If they arent disposed off once you log off or are inactive for a while then over time you will eat up all the available ram on the system with these inactive sessions. Rebooting/recycling the app pool clears them and so everything is great again.
However you get other versions eg counters with a limited max size which depending on the language and the variable type could be restricted to 65,535.
So using the website example again if we had a counter keeping the sessions synced it could get interesting if you are user 65536.
The patriot missile failure was apparently a variation on this theme with a clock time drifting out of sync due to max size allowed. A semi related variant on the count size was when track and trace lost a bunch of results last year.

Could someone try that for the Tory party please?

A semi related variant on the count size was when track and trace lost a bunch of results last year.

Wasn't that to do with someone taking data from an xlsx file and putting it into an xls which couldn't handle all the rows? Or am I thinking of something else?

Wasn’t that to do with someone taking data from an xlsx file and putting it into an xls which couldn’t handle all the rows?

Yes. Either opening a xlsx/csv file of more than 65,536 rows in an older version of esxcel or using a automation tool which had the same limitation. So it lost all the additional records.

It's also more time for things to happen and the software to get into a state of "oh, I didn't think of that".

Probably less so on aeroplanes and missiles, but for consumer electronics almost certainly a factor.

Just turn everything off overnight 🤓

Just turn everything off overnight

I pretty much do, ingrained behaviour from my Dad who would go round the house unplugging everything before going to bed!

Must have been a concern about something causing a fire as we also have six Nest smoke alarms and half a dozen fire extinguishers in the house.

The things you get from parents!

Some sage advice here

Could someone try that for the Tory party please?

Just turn it off and leave it off.

@dove1 agreed

I have been on a plane, still on the ground, when captain tells us it will go black for a bit as they had to turn the plane off then on again.
It worked.