Okay, I have what I consider to be an unpopular opinion, even though I think it is the correct opinion, and that opinion is that we should all be restarting our devices more frequently than we actually do.
Imagine you’re in the scenario that so many of us have been in where you’re on your computer, you have a bunch of tabs open, like 20 or 30 tabs open. You can’t make heads or tails of them. You don’t remember what you were researching and then you turn on the computer and all these tabs are open. You’re like, “Man, I don’t know, I don’t want to manage all these tabs. I don’t want to organize, so I don’t know what to do with them.” Here’s the solution: restart your computer.
Why is that a solution?
- It gives you a fresh slate. You restart your computer and you don’t have any tabs open anymore. If you were doing something important enough to remember, it’ll come back or you’ll remember to bring it back. If not, then it wasn’t that important and you’re fine.
- Restarting your computer means that you’re freeing up resources on your computer. All those random applications you opened days or weeks ago that have just sat idle in memory were slowing it down, bogging it down. You get all those resources back.
- This is the part that people typically try to avoid. It allows your computer to do updates when it goes down, so it’s kind of a win-win-win. You get the latest software features that typically help improve your device. You free up all that clutter you had. You also make your computer faster.
This is not limited to computers. There are so many people that are terrified of restarting their phone or they run into issues with their phone, like “Oh my phone is lagging” or “Oh my phone is doing this weird thing.” The first thing I ask them is, “When was the last time you restarted your phone?” because I tell you, restarting your phone solves most of the issues. Personally, I don’t know why this isn’t a popular thing. Maybe people are afraid of losing the context they have. Maybe they don’t like the process of waiting for a device to restart. But if you think about it, the amount of time that you’re sitting in frustration with the weird bug or lagginess typically exceeds the length of time it takes to just restart your device. You know, the old “unplug it, plug it back in” that works in a lot of cases. It really does.
So here is my proposed timeline for restarting devices:
- Your computer: I personally believe you should restart that every single day.
- Recommended: Every day
- Worst-case: Every three days
- Your phone / Tablets: Honestly these can go a little bit longer without being restarted, so I would say every three days.
- Recommended: Every three days
- Worst-case: Once a week
- Your TV: In some cases if you have a smart TV, turning your TV off and on is not actually the same as restarting it. It’s kind of just turning the screen off. In some cases you have to go to the settings and actually do a restart. Smart TVs get easily bogged down by background processes and they don’t have a lot of resources to begin with.
- Recommended: Once a week
- Worst-case: Every two weeks
- Your printer: Printers are notorious for being difficult to deal with. Save yourself confusion and headache: just restart that. Honestly, keep it unplugged. Plug it back in only when you need it.
- Recommended: Every week
- Your smartwatch: it’s easy to forget about this one because it kind of just stays on. It lives on your wrist. You charge it up. But restarting it can be very helpful!
- Recommended: Once a week
- Your router: this one is a difficult one because it’s very dependent on the hardware and the equipment you have. I had an issue with my AT&T Fiber router like three years ago where if the router or the gateway was online for more than a certain amount of time, it would just suddenly start to drop packets frequently. You feel like the performance is bad. I mean obviously there can be other factors into why your performance is bad and you’re paying for good speeds, but restarting is an easy one. If you have a more robust network setup, like enterprise-grade hardware, then I think you can honestly get away with restarting maybe once a month.
- Recommended: Every other day
- Worst-case: Once a month (with enterprise-grade hardware)
- Your smart home devices: so this means your Google speakers, your Alexas, your Homepods, etc…
- Recommended: Every two weeks