We see a lot of issues people have with Windows 10 that are resolved with a restart. The old IT response of “Have you tried shutting it down and restarting?” is now truer than ever but with a catch. You HAVE to restart in a specific way that people don’t always find intuitive as a lot of people think turning the power off and back on is the most thorough option.
When you do a Shutdown on Windows 10 its not really a shutdown – Its a close all open files and programs and then Hibernate the Windows operating system. This means when you power back on Windows will “Boot” nice and quick but it hasn’t actually had a full refresh. We’ve seen some very strange issues on PC’s that linger after a shutdown and power on that simply need a Windows Restart to fix. Simply Push the Microsoft Logo button (The old start button) in the bottom left corner click on the Power symbol and then on restart and it’ll actually fully refresh your windows session. Sometimes after Windows runs updates in the background it can leave things a little unstable until you do the restart.
One of the really odd symptoms we’ve seen was a PC that wouldn’t play netflix – It didn’t matter what browser you tried or even if you used the Windows APP for netflix it just wouldn’t play any video. It worked on every other video source we tried other than netflix. The user had powered the machine off with a shutdown and back on numerous times since the issue cropped up – All it needed to fix it was a restart. Other than that one symptom nothing else appeared to be wrong with the PC.
So next time something is misbehaving try a restart before you call your IT guy and incur a bill (Not that I’d charge a client for asking you to restart and call me back if that doesn’t work).