Magic Reboot

We've all done it, haven't we? The magic reboot.

Hell, a TV show bastardised it into a central tenet of abusing us Tech Kind. "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" Well the "Magic Reboot" is the Server Admin equivalent.

Almost whispering it, feeling the gaze of a colleague burning into your soul at the mere mention of it.

Let my stare burn into your psyche and turn on that imposter syndrome.

It was never about being lazy, though, was it?

OK, yeah, it fucking was.

But I can't be arsed spending 30 minutes or an entire day digging into the far end of fart, only to find out it needs a reboot anyway. It's some niggly little, unimportant, shitty thing. I'm fine not knowing what it was. I've got shit to do.

Well, that was before AI. Now we're all supposed to be supercharged productivity monsters.

So, why was my ridiculously long-past-EOL system showing unusual CPU load?

I want to know, but I'm not doing the grunt work on this one. Over to you, Shiny Frontier Model.

"Hey AI, what the fuck is wrong with this thing?"

Off it goes, chatting shit about all sorts of bollocks. Cheers mate. Everything you've mentioned is fine. The box is doing what the box does.

Fuck it. I'll check the process list myself.

"Hey AI, that's the thing there. Forget those application pools, they're just busy. Riddle me this though... why the fuck is svchost chewing through an entire CPU core?"

After a bit of pissing about in the ancient but glorious Process Explorer, me and this HAL wannabe discover that the Network Location Awareness service, yeah, me neither, has got itself stuck in a loop for some unbeknownst reason.

Restart the service.

Boom. Sorted.

And then?

Rebooted the fucker anyway.

Waste of fucking time.