Is it really worth restarting my computer?

Anyone who works with computers has been asked to do this at some point in time and probably felt it was a ploy used to put off investigating the problem in detail. However, it really does work, and can fix program and software glitches.

For instance, we often have customers who cannot send and receive mail using the mail programs on their personal computers. After checking the mail servers and port numbers, everything seems to be set up correctly, but the mail program refuses to work. In these situations we often ask customers to restart their computer. Surprisingly they often tell us that everything works again.

So why does restarting the computer help? The problem is normally related to the antivirus software on the PC, especially software that intercepts incoming and outgoing mail connections (it’s common with Norton and Symantec antivirus products). The virus scanner somehow “hangs” and needs to be restarted — but virus scanner manufacturers aren’t going out of their way to make it easy to restart the scanners (they invisibly run in the background on your PC). The simplest fix is restarting your whole computer.