It seems like a tired old joke, but it’s quite true. More than half of all errors on almost all systems can be “fixed” by turning off the system and restarting it.

This allows the system to begin with a blank slate, it reloads the software and starts all calculations afresh.

It is truly the one thing that a “tech person” will do first when trying to fix a problem. Switch everything off (completely, ideally also disconnect the power), then back on. You will be surprised how many errors are never showing up again! This technique can be adapted to resetting and reinstalling software, but we’ll get into that in a later article.