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“That’s why sleep mode won’t resolve your computer’s restart prompt,” she says. Instead, sleep mode keeps your place so you can pick up where you left off - akin to putting a bookmark in your novel. And another reason you may need to restart your computer is to reset your Internet connection - perhaps you switched WiFi networks or had to reset your modem.Ĭonversely, just putting your device into sleep mode doesn’t flush RAM or restart an Internet connection, explains Burnside. “If your computer isn’t functioning normally or seems to be bogged down by the use of several programs, a restart might solve the issue,” she says. Restarting also flushes out your RAM, your computer's temporary, working memory, says Burnside, and keeps apps from tapping into the RAM even when you thought you’d closed them. “But newer OS versions require fewer restarts than their predecessors, so you should be seeing restart prompts less in the future,” she adds.
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“If you want the benefits of this update, you’ll need to restart.” She says that this is because your computer can’t replace files while they’re in use, and therefore, it needs time to swap them while you’re not using the computer. “Your computer often prompts a restart when it has made an update,” says Rochelle Burnside, who manages the internet service provider (ISP) category for, a product and service review site. But do we really need to do so that often or every time we’re prompted to? According to experts, how often you should restart your computer all depends.įirst, it’s important to know why your computer asks you to restart - and what happens when it does so. Every week, it seems like our computers tell us to restart them for updates, whether it’s while we’re using them or as we’re about to put them into “sleep” mode after getting done with work, or a Netflix binge, at the end of the day.
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