How Often Should I Restart My Device? (Laptop, Tablet, Smartphone)

How Often Should I Restart My Device? (Laptop, Tablet, Smartphone)

This article will cover

  1. What happens when you restart your computer, tablet or phone
  2. When and how often to restart and when to shut down

You will need

  1. Your computer, tablet or phone

1 - What happens when you restart?

  1. Restarting (or rebooting) your computer, tablet or phone helps keep it running smoothly
  2. It clears the working memory (RAM), closing any tasks that are using a lot of that memory
  3. A reboot can also fix peripheral and hardware issues
  4. For most devices, restarting also involves background maintenance routines that run automatically to refresh the system and help keep things running smoothly

1.1 On a Mac computer

  1. On a Mac, restarting the computer shuts it down completely and then automatically turns it back on
  2. Shutting it down simply turns the entire computer off
IMPORTANT: Do NOT use the power button to restart or shut down your Mac computer unless your system is frozen (not responding normally)
Instead, use the proper software method

1.2 On a Windows computer

  1. On a Windows personal computer (PC), things work differently than on a Mac computer - when you restart / reboot a PC,  it does NOT turn everything off before turning back on
  2. Some of the applications and functions keep running during the reboot process, so if your system isn’t running properly, you’ll want to make sure to perform a shut down (power off) and then turn it back on
IMPORTANT: Do NOT use the power button to restart or shut down your Windows computer unless your system is frozen (not responding normally)
Instead, use the proper software method to restart or shut down

1.3 On a tablet or phone

  1. All iPads and iPhones, and most Android tablets and phones do not have a restart option
  2. Instead, you simply use the shut down or power off command

2 - When to restart and when to shut down

2.1 With a Mac computer

  1. On a Mac, restart if your computer prompts you to do so (e.g. after installing new software or updates, or if you change certain system settings, etc.)
  2. If your Mac is slow or not working properly and you need to keep working, restart it
  3. If you won't be using your Mac for several hours or more, shut it down

2.2 With a Windows computer

  1. On a Windows PC, restart if your computer prompts you to do so (e.g. after installing new software or updates, or if you change certain system settings, etc.)
  2. If your Windows PC is slow or not working properly and you need to keep working, restart it
NOTE: Windows machines now come with fast startup which actually keeps some operations from stopping fully when your computer is shut down
We recommend turning the fast startup feature off so that the computer will fully stop all functions when you shut down

2.3 With a tablet or phone

  1. On an iPad, iPhone or Android device, shut down and then turn on again if your device prompts you to do so (e.g. after installing new software or updates, or if you change certain system settings, etc.)
  2. If your tablet or phone is slow or not working properly and you need to keep working, shut it down and then turn it on again

2.4 For Mac and Windows computers, tablets and phones

  1. For all computers, tablets or phones, we recommend that you restart (or shut off and turn on again) once per week to help keep your device running smoothly

Additional resources

Apple

Microsoft