Throughout the workday one might sometimes encounter errors and questionable behavior of applications. For example, recently, I encountered an unknown error while writing another article. Quickly, I started searching for the source of the problem, which is commonly called troubleshooting.

When looking for solutions for the error, often the first thing that you are told to do is to restart your device before further investigating the issue. This may seem unnecessary and tedious at first glance since you will need to save all open documents and reopen them after the device is restarted. But this simple task can often fix the issue without requiring laborious analysis.

There are two main aspects of how a restart may help in troubleshooting:

First of all, with this procedure the malfunctioning application and the operating system are restarted. This may help fix software related issues, because both are initialized to a clean state, background processes are closed, and system resources are freed.

Second, some computer components are reset because the power is turned off during the process, which can help in removing malfunctioning behaviour arising from the hardware.

In my case, it did not help - and this will be the expected outcome in most scenarios. In general, this is a workaround rather than a solution to avoid the problem in the future. But if it works out, you can save quite a lot of time, so it is always worth a try.

Also, frequently restarting your computer every few days can help avoid running into issues in the first place.