Anthony here– Most of you know me as the head of our Technical Support Department and the subject of an email series called “Anthony Cares”. I live in an area that has really bad cell phone coverage. Every night when I get home I need to restart my phone so that it can connect to my the micro cell which allows me to use the phone in my house. It doesn’t matter which type of phone- iPhone, Android or even my Windows phones all need to be rebooted in order to use these devices in my home.

Long story short, if any devices you have are not working properly, simply powering them off and on clears up a lot of issues. In fact, some of the calls into our support line can be cleared up by restarting the devices.

From the moment you power on a device, there could be dozens of tasks and processes loading and running without you doing a single thing. Let’s use a computer as an example: The computer is handling many tasks that you are not aware of. Some problems that can happen include but are not limited to the following:

• Sometimes applications can have an issue in which it increases usage of RAM, meaning slower system.
• Sometimes an application that you canceled out of didn’t properly close and that can also bog down your system.
• Sometimes you have a web browser open with multiple tabs open eating away at resources.
  sometimes there is a driver issue with hardware like printer or network adapter which would cause those to not work properly

The same holds true on my iPhone, if an app isn’t working properly the Apple support link says first try and restart the app and if that doesn’t work restart the phone. My Droid devices fair no better with a restart being the first thing recommended by Google on the support site.

In Short– A restart wipes the slate clean, which can do wonders for the operation and health of a system and devices. Also a restart works on a ton of other issues. Things running slow? Try a restart . The internet running slow? restart the router. Food delivery taking too long? Well you are up the creek. So the next time you encounter an issue with your system running RetailEdge, try a reboot. If that doesn’t work give us a call. We are more than happy to try and help.

Note:  In Windows you have a couple options, Restart and Shut Down.  Although this may be counter intuitive, by default a Restart does more than a Shut Down.  On Windows 11, with a shut down, the system saves the current session loaded into memory.  This allows you to pick up where you left off quickly.    This article will show you how to disable fast startup on your system if you want to have the Shut Down behave the same as a Restart.