Windows 10’s Rebootable Offenses

In some small way, it’s nice to know we’ve not come too far, or gotten too far ahead of ourselves, but in the other respect WHY ARE WE STILL REBOOTING OUR PCS TO FIX ISSUES?

I’m all for nostalgia. This time of year tends to hit me additionally hard, for some reason. And, the older I get, it only gets worse. I have a wonderfully happy life, but I still get melancholy during the fall season, remembering High School, college, playing sports (soccer and basketball were my games), and hanging out and goofing off with dear friends then that I still have today. It’s amazing how real those memories can be and how they affect a day. It’s like having a built in HoloLens, I guess.

Those are good memories and ones that I cherish dearly. It’s the bad memories that are supposed to fade over time, or lessen in intensity. I can’t remember every time I’ve bumped my knee, for example, though for some reason I do it quite frequently. Somehow every time I sit down, the table leg figures out exactly where and how I’ll be sitting. I’ve grown accustomed to the pain over the years and it’s become a common joke between the wife and I. She believes I just don’t have great body awareness. Me? I blame our smaller-than-I-like kitchen area. Of course, this happens when eating out, too, so my theory doesn’t really hold any merit. Somehow I just can’t help destroying my kneecaps constantly. I’ll admit secretly that it’s a flaw, but just not important enough to me to fix, I guess.

However, there are some things we can fix – at least some things I believe are important enough to attempt to manage to fix. One of those is rebooting the PC to fix problems.

By now, with Windows 10 firmly in our grasp, one would think that the woes of yesteryear would be firmly behind us. Granted, Windows 10 is still a work in progress and will continually be so for the next 10 years, but I can’t tell you the number of times since installing that I’ve rebooted the PC just to clear out weirdness.

This morning, in fact, I lost an entire article in our CMS while working in Microsoft Edge. Sometimes Edge tabs will go haywire, and each time you click on a tab to bring the page into view, Edge will refresh the page completely – like I’m trying to access it for the first time. The fix? Reboot.

I can understand the need to reboot in earlier versions of Windows (prior to Windows 8). I’ve always held a grudge against poorly written 3^rd party apps (*ahem* Adobe) that are a big reason reboots are necessary. But, built-in apps? Or, ones that have been developed by Microsoft for Microsoft? That makes no sense.

Windows 10 Store not working? Reboot.

Windows 10 Mail and Calendar app flaking out? Reboot.

Wi-Fi not connecting coming out of sleep mode? Reboot.

General weirdness? Reboot.

I run multiple PCs and tablets, running different editions of Windows 10, and they all exhibit the same problems with the same Windows 10 apps that only a reboot will fix.

Thankfully, Windows 10 allows much quicker PC restarts, so the process is not as painful as it used to be. But, that doesn’t make it any better, particularly when you lose data (like I did this morning), or have to halt what you’re doing completely to perform the 3-finger salute. I can’t even imagine how end-users must feel hearing that overused query from the helpdesk: “Have your restarted your PC yet?” I’m sure it’s a big joke in the end-user population and doesn’t make the IT staff seem as intelligent as they surely are.

Are you also experiencing the need to reboot with Windows 10? If so, in which specific scenarios and apps? Do you think this is fixable or is restarting the PC just a bit of PC history nostalgia we have to live with?