I sang the praises of restarting in my piece “Defaults And Reboots.” Oh, that fixer of fixers, that restorer of restorers! The tried-and-true trick which works so often, that it ranks among the top troubleshooting methods of all time. A shoo-in for the fix-it Hall Of Fame.
I came across a fitting tribute to the reboot that I just had to share with you: “The Restart Page.” It’s a great piece of interactive IT history. You can see what it was like to reboot the most popular consumer operating systems of the recent past. The Restart Page has audio too: hear the sonorous horns of Windows 2000 Professional starting up, the plaintive wail of Mac OS 9, and the deliciously primitive beep of a Windows version 1-era computer.
Running through these (and I must admit I clicked on all of them), stirred memories of problems bested by nothing more than hitting the “restart” button. Also, because shutting down a computer is often an end-of-day work ritual, I found myself having flashbacks to previous jobs. Memories are stored in our routines…
THE ART OF TROUBLESHOOTING 