Today I watched South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. I used a different computer with a DVD player supporting movies from that region, unlike the one of my laptop. The video and music were played correctly, but it was nearly impossible to hear any speech. Then, after observing the same problem with another movie, I unplugged the headphones and plugged them again. Then it worked.
This method may be used to solve many problems with computer hardware or software. There is even a koan about power-cycling a Lisp machine – the designer of the machine said that this method won’t work, but he fixed the machine just by turning it off and on.
Several times the wireless network card of my laptop stopped working until a complete cold boot. Suspend to disk didn’t solve the problem, but turning the machine off, waiting several minutes and turning it on again worked. (I didn’t report this problem to the maintainers of the driver since I don’t know how to reproduce this bug.)
For most network problems on my other computer it is enough to unplug the Ethernet cable and plug it again. Although at least two times this didn’t help, but a reboot fixed this problem.
Usually people whom I know do not ask for help when a problem occur, but reboot the faulty computer and resume their work without observing the problem again. Of course, this wouldn’t help in critical systems, but this is still a reason to design reliable hardware and software instead of these faulty boxes with short uptime.
