One of the most tried and true answers given to users when their computers are acting up is to try to reboot the machine and, very often, this will fix the problem. Here are a couple of metaphors to help you understand why:

• Basically because anything that's got in a mess gets the chance to start over. Imagine you're making toast and you burn it. Throwing it away and starting again is one way to fix that problem and will always work out better than scraping the burnt bits of toast off.
• Ok, imagine you have a whiteboard where you have space to write 5 things you need to do. Every so often you scrub out a task you've completed and replace it with a new one. Now say you accidentally pick up a permanent marker rather than a water soluble one to write your new task. When you come to scrub out this task you can't until you wipe the whole board clean with some alcohol. Restarting you computer is "the same" as wiping the board clean, it removes all the "stuck" code.

Answers are from SuperUser Questions, Why does restarting a computer fix things?)

Did you know?... Alt-F4 (and sometimes Ctrl+W or Ctrl+Q), or Command+Q on a Mac, is the keyboard shortcut for quitting the current application. In Windows it will quit the currently open application that's in focus (active) on the screen. On a Mac this is also generally the case, but sometimes it's not as clear (to know which application is going to quit when you perform this keyboard command, just look in the upper left corner to see it's name).

That is all for this time, stay tuned for the next Small Bytes!