Is a cold boot more effective than a warm boot at clearing the cobwebs out of a computer,

[raccoon]

or is there no difference?

[ret5hd]

1. try a steel-toed boot.

that's what i find is most effective.

[raccoon]

2. I don't have one. What can I do? nt

[ManiacJoe]

3. It depends on the problem.

If the problem seems isolated to a particular piece of software, a soft boot should work fine.

If the problem seems related to hardware or its drivers, a hard boot may be what is needed. In this case, the better option might be to turn off the computer and wait 2 minutes for the electricity to drain from any of the capacitors on the cards.

[RC]

4. Unpluging the computer makes sure it forgets.

Just turning it off still leaves parts of the computer circuitry on and the problem may be there. That little green light on the mother board...

That power button is not really a power button. It connects to the firmware. That is why it normally takes a few seconds to shutdown when you hold the button in.

[RoccoR5955]

5. If it's a software problem, it would be more effective to

remove power from the device than to either warm, cold, lukewarm, hot, or otherwise boot.

Removing power for a minute or two will reset the hardware.

[Alan_Silverman]

6. cold

Leave off for a minute. When turning on, hold down the power button for 4 seconds, then let up. That will often clear up problems.

[backscatter712]

7. Sometimes. It won't hurt. It does sometimes help when a warm boot doesn't

As long as there's power going to your computer's electronics, various pieces including memory, internal chip registers and caches, etc. are going to retain some information that could be causing problems.

Usually, a warm reboot will force the system to reload Windows or whatever OS you're using, and all the drivers and other software, which usually has routines to clear out said retained information and reinitialize things like your drivers & hardware, which means most of the time, a warm boot works.

But not all of the time. Sometimes, a gadget gets in a really strange state, and the only way to get it out of that state is to turn the damned thing off, which clears the memory, registers & internal caches in the hardware, and thus lets you do a boot with a clean slate.