The Importance of Rebooting your MacBook

Many of you may remember years ago when computer operating systems were not the most stable systems in the world. On the Windows side you had the legendary "Blue Screen of Death" which Bill Gates himself experienced during a presentation of Windows 98. On the Mac side you remember the occasional and annoying "Kernel Panic" sometimes accompanied by a black screen and cryptic text.

Back in the day, technology people would recommend rebooting your computer on a regular basis to help prevent those operating system meltdowns. But over the years operating systems have gotten much more stable, and your daily work suddenly being interrupted by a cranky computer are nearly a thing of the past.

However, there still are some important reasons to reboot your computer on a regular basis, perhaps, once a week:

• Reset misbehaving software. Like your computer's operating system, sometimes software can misbehave. An application can run slow, seem flaky or outright crash. A reboot can help resolve those problems.
• Heal background processes. All computers have processes that run in the background that you may not even notice—until something goes wrong. Like an application, sometimes a background process may cause your computer to lose connection with our management system, or a printer driver may choke. Restarting can reset those processes and get them working again.
• Operating system updates/upgrades. When it's time to apply a security or bug fix update to your operating system, you'll need to reboot your computer as a final step in the installation process.

In some cases when rebooting, you don't want to lose your place in an application you may have open. For example, you may have several Chrome tabs open that you don't want to lose. In that case, simply check "Reopen windows when logging back in" after initiating a restart and the applications you had open when you restarted the computer will re-open after a restart.

Remember, restarting you computer is a simple way to keep your computing lifestyle running smoothly. 

And just in case you were curious, here's Bill Gates experiencing a "blue screen of death" during a presentation: https://youtu.be/IW7Rqwwth84