Is reboot the same as restart?

Biggus_Dickus

prowla said:

Restart & reboot mean the same thing.

Many moons ago when I first started to work in the ‘Computer Industry’ (the phrase ‘IT’ wasn’t common parlance back then!) systems could be ‘booted’ (or re-booted) or ‘reset/restart’.

A ‘reset’ meant op.sys was reloaded whilst the machine was already up and running;...power was maintained to the machine etc throughout the process. A reset/restart wasn’t to be taken lightly as work/data still in the ram could be lost.

If a  ‘re-boot’ was required the machine had to be first ‘Shutdown’...a ‘graceful’ Shutdown saved all data to disk and then powered the machine off completely. A re-boot (or boot-up) occurred when the machine was powered on again.

It was easy back then but such is the complexity these days the phraseology is open to semantics/interpretation.

For anyone sad enough to be bothered this (thankfully short!) article has a good stab at explaining the modern idiom;... Soft Reboot vs Hard Reboot vs Restart vs Reset.😁

 

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/reboot-vs-soft-reboot-vs-hard-reboot-vs-restart-vs-reset

jamesd

prowla said:

Restart & reboot mean the same thing.

Some people might misuse the words in that way but there's a difference between reloading an operating system from disk - a reboot - and telling it to restart itself - just change its internal settings. Fixing memory corruption and a more full hardware resetting are two of the differences between them. And speed, a restart is faster than a reboot.

Windows used to do more reloading on a restart but much of that has been optimised away to make the restart faster.