18 Problems Only Tech Support Workers Will Understand

14. Sometime A Reboot Is The Only Option

So you watched the €œIT Crowd€ and thought €œha, yes, that€™s all they do is just switch it off and on again€. Well, that€™s because sometimes that€™s the only way to fix it. Whether it€™s a locked thread that you just can€™t get rid of or some cached area of memory that just refuses to purge itself there are some situations where it€™s just not possible to gracefully fix it. Yes, there is the odd occasion where we will just reboot it because it would take longer to find out what you did to break it and sometimes we do it just out of spite, telling you your files are unrecoverable. They weren€™t, but then you were a knob at the office party and slagging off IT so you deserve everything you get. But no techie worth their salt will reboot a PC or a server without good cause. It€™s a matter of professional pride for us to find the fault and get the machine working smoothly, not to mention the fact we have SLAs and downtime costs us money. So if we say we have to reboot, we have to reboot. No amount of crying, whining, whinging or running to your boss will make any difference. All of this is less of an issue with Windows 7 and 8, especially Windows 8 since they are both pretty solid and boot much faster, but hands up who is still supporting XP? Everyone? Thought so. That sucker just needs rebooted every now and again REGARDLESS just because of how it works (badly).