Quick computer situation update

Well, I may have overreacted about the computer situation last time. I haven’t had an unplanned reboot in the past 10 days. My cousin on Facebook suggested it might be an issue with the power-saving sleep settings, which I was skeptical of because the restarts had occurred earlier than I’d set the sleep mode to engage. But I realized he had a point — the restarts only happened when I was away from the computer for a while.

So I looked deeper into the settings, and I found that the hard disk was set to shut down after 45 minutes idle. The online sources I looked up didn’t agree on whether a solid state drive should or even can be shut down, but at least one thing suggested that it might cause problems. So I’m just guessing, but maybe the auto-shutdown causes some kind of SSD glitch that forces a reboot.

I couldn’t figure out how to set the drive shutdown to “never,” but I set it for 300 minutes, long enough that it’s unlikely to kick in. I also realized that it was unwise for me to get out of the habit of putting my computer in sleep mode when I went out. My laptop was so slow to start up and shut down that I guess I was too impatient to wait for it, even in sleep mode, but this computer is so fast that there’s no reason not to let it sleep. So I’ve started to get back into that habit.

Of course, I can’t be sure any of this has fixed the problem, or that I was even correct about the problem. You can’t prove a negative. But so far, signs are encouraging.