Make a regular shutdown a thing

What kind of shutdown? A factory shutdown? Shut down the business for a period of time? Well, not exactly…

We’re simply referring to the aged old thing in the IT and Computer world, which is along the lines of “Have you turned it off and on again?”

We all get frustrated with slow and underperforming computers. And I know it’s stereotypical to ask “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” – but in all seriousness, the amount of people who haven’t tried that, is very high…

Over the last week or so at Lucid Towers, on at least three occasions I’ve seen requests coming in, to do with computer-related performance. On all of those three occasions, the computers had been left on for over a week, and in one case (my inspiration for this article) it was seven months! Seven months without a full restart! It’s no wonder it was struggling.

Now, in all fairness, this may not be directly a result of people not clicking on shutdown or restart. It might be that they’re doing this, but their power settings are set to make the computer go to sleep, or into fast boot mode when they do this, which in turn means the computer isn’t fully shut down or fully restarted. These settings are located in your power options in the Control Panel.

With your power options set correctly, and in turn, doing a full shutdown of your computer every day when you’ve finished using it, will increase performance, keep it secure (as updates will apply when you shut down) and it will reduce your overall power consumption. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Unless you don’t eat meat of course.

The simple truth here is, there really is something in turning it off (fully) and turning it back on again…as much as we joke about it ourselves, it quite simply helps with many things. It’s the same as us going to bed, sleeping and waking up again – it’s something you need to do every day.

Please go forth, check your power options (or ask for help with this) and give your computer the regular shutdown it craves.

Gavin Moorhouse is the owner of Lucid Computer Solutions, an IT Support and Computer Services based in Redditch, Worcestershire. They shut down every evening at 5 pm.