Quote:
Originally posted by Redjake
Jesus, where not going to war with Iraq by restarting your computer. Whenever something on my computer is messed up, I restart. I'm sure there are thousands, of not millions, of other people who do the same thing. Why is restarting your computer such a big deal? Am I missing something? Is there some "restarting your computer" conspiracy that I'm not hearing about? Just restart it. See if it fixes it. If not, try something else  It's not like you are only permitted a small amount of restarts per day. It would be different if I was saying "format and reinstall Windows." But nope. Restarting your computer. As in turning it off and turning it on. What's the big deal?
I'm glad you were able to fix the problem. But just because restarting didn't fix it this time around doesn't mean restarting your computer in the future is a waste and should be a last resort. It's usually the first thing I try, and it usually fixes the problem
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Just to be clear, I did
not restart my computer. It's not that rebooting didn't fix my problem (as your second last sentence implied), it's that I
didn't even try! In fact, I'm
sure rebooting would have fixed things! It's just that I would really hate to have to reboot and, if there were an alternative, I would take it. Yes, I did find an alternative and this makes me happy. I also thought it would be a funny anecdote to share among other geeks on TFP but, alas, I don't think anyone was amused by all this.
Now, you have mentioned incredulity over my attitudes against rebooting so let me try to explain to you why I dislike it so much.
You mentioned that you
would have understood my position if I had to reinstall Windows, right? Why is that? I will take a guess and say it's because reinstalling is a colossal pain in the ass, right? Well, rebooting is a pain in the ass as well. Of course, it's not nearly as bad as reinstalling but it's bad enough for me to look for alternatives.
You see, if I were doing nothing, or only had winamp running, then I would have simply rebooted. Why not? I could simply restart winamp and it would probably have remembered my playlist. However, I have a little more than just winamp running. In fact, I have more than twenty applications running, about half of which I use for professional development (my job). Launching all those apps again would be annoying enough but there's more. Two of these applications are my RCS clients, which are in a peculiar state while I'm trying to perform a branch merge. I would hate to have to do this, again. Another is
FireFox, which has about fifty tabs open (my estimate, after counting ten) and the save tab layout feature has never worked for me (it's version 0.8). Several of these applications are also
Internet Explorer, on websites I'd hate to have to go find again (because
FireFox has trouble displaying more than fifty tabs without the tab extensions installed on a 1600 pixel wide display). My
MSDN browser is on a particularly interesting page that I'd hate to go find again (see a pattern here?). Not to mention that the undo and history stacks on several of my applications will be lost if I had to restart them.
I haven't even mentioned the aesthetic displeasure of having to reboot a crappy operating system. I am very pleased to see that, not only does
Homey_V agree with me, but he even mentioned some important points and said them well. If I may quote him, "
you shouldn't need to restart your computer to fix a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place." He also mentions how this attitude just adds to the complacency of developers and the general quality of software.
Let me diverge a bit and mention a story my sister told me. She signed up with
AOL because they gave her several months of service, free, while she had every intention of cancelling before the trial period (she is unnecessarily cheap). She was using their latest software (6.0?) and she was confused by how unstable it was. She said it perpetually crashed and she didn't understand how it could be perfectly acceptable to a consumer to have to continually restart their software. Was this normal? Is all software like this? Is this just part of computing?
That's what you're saying when you say "ah, simply reboot." You're saying that it
is perfectly normal to have your software incessantly fuck up on you. You're saying that this is okay and we should only expect more in the future.
Excuse me if I have higher standards than that...