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Rebooting XP tech hejp

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Does anyone know where I could find a white paper or tech article about the importance of rebooting Windows XP frequently? I used to be a tech at my company, until we got outsourced. So now I work in a call center there as an support admin for the phone system software (Genesys). We have hundreds of computers, and are constanly having problems with them. Like anyone with common sense knows, even XP needs to be rebooted once in awhile to clear out corrupted DLL's still in memory, or a corrupted pagefile, or a patch pushed through SMS. or any number of other reasons. What they do now, is each user just logs off, and the next one logs in. Most of these computers have never been rebooted for MONTHS! I tried to explain this to my team and boss, but one of the fellow workers I have to deal with (UGH!!!!!) shoots down every ooone of my suggestions at every chance he can get - even though I was a TECH in my company for 12 years!!!!! So if there is any tech document hard copy I can use, it would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks

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Unless there is a problem, there is no need to reboot XP on a regular basis. I doubt you'll find a tech article or white paper telling you to reboot XP when it gets screwed up, that's just obvious. If your boss can't figure that out, maybe he ought to be out front parking cars instead of running a call center. smile

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The main reasons why you would want to reboot a PC is:

 

1. Add/remove hardware drivers.

2. Add/remove application software.

3. Add/remove windows patches.

4. Low memory conditions e.g. memory fragmentation.

5. Removal of viruses and malware which may reside in memory.

 

In most other cases, a reboot is not required.

 

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If it's any help, Vista requires even less reboots than XP ever did. If you tested Vista before, but haven't run the RTM, don't let your impressions of the alphas, betas, or RCs keep you from running it. I have found that the long term uptime of it, and using things standby and hibernate, are fantastic. It also seems to recover memory much more aggressively than the older OS versions do.

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Another good reason as to why you should reboot a PC is due to the resources that have been used up. When a program is opened, it uses a certain amount of resources to open it and keep it running. When you close that program, not all of the resources are freed up. Constantly opening and closing applications (including logging off and on) will eventually slow the PC down. Better operating systems have less problems with this (e.g., ME sucks at this while XP is better with it).

 

In addition, this also has to do with your physical components and what they can handle. If a HDD is fragmented pretty badly, even a reboot won't help out too much. If the system doesn't have too much RAM, then that could also cause issues. It really depends on the scenario.

 

I usually instruct our employees to reboot once every two weeks. It helps out with a lot of different potential issues. In regards to your original scenario, you should just ask the person who uses the machine at the very end of the week to reboot upon leaving. It really isn't too hard of a thing for a user to do and doesn't seem like too asinine of a request.

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use an auto ram defragment program such as free ram xp pro - freeware found on many freeware/shareware sites - it also works on vista- adjust to suit each machine. defrag hdd once a week is always recommended or even daily in a heavy work environment. All techs and even MS recommend this.

Then there are junk removers such as crap cleaner [ccleaner] which is also freeware - however it must be setup properly so you don't delete cookies from some websites that you wish to keep - such as auto logins.

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