I have noticed, from interactions with our customers, that more and more people are not rebooting their computer often enough.

Recommended articles:

- (2 minute read) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/power/about-power-management

- (10 minute read) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/power/system-power-states

Applications known to require a reboot when they update:

- Windows Update

- BullGuard

- Driver updates (some hardware components bring their own driver update software you can use)

Why?

Most operating systems, Windows in this case, have services which run in the background, to allow you to open and close various applications seamlessly and to keep configuration files, so you don't need to manually configure everything every time you want to use it.

When a service like this gets an update, it will function without the update until the computer is rebooted and run the updated version after the reboot.

What happens if you don't reboot/restart?

To your eyes, nothing much happens. In reality, the problem is that, withough the reboot, you will not have the latest version of that piece of software. This can leave you vulnerable, it can make other applications bisbehave, because they were expecting to see the updated version of that software and can even crash the system in the worst cases.

What can you do?

Just hit that restart button from time to time.