Do you think twice or hesitate when you need to restart or reboot your computer? Normally, when it comes to my home computers, it’s not a big deal. The need doesn’t arise very often and when it does, I’m back up and running in a minute or so. Unfortunately, when it comes to my work computer, rebooting is a pain in the ass.
The reason for this is because for game development, I require a large number of programs to be running at the same time to be productive. At any given moment, my work computer is running two code editors (also known as an IDE), source control program (Perforce for us), e-mail client (Outlook), a web browser with dozens of tabs, Slack, a few File Explorer windows, and at least three proprietary programs that assist with making the game. When I reboot my workstation, all those programs need to shut down, and when Windows boots up again, all of those programs need to be started again.
It’s kinda a pain in the ass to have to launch all of those programs. Also, some of them don’t just start immediately and can be used. Some of them are quite resource intensive and take a while to start and even when they are running, they then need to index a large data set before the program can be used fully. Some times my browser doesn’t remember all the tabs it had open. Even when it does, each tab actually needs to load the page again when you click on it, which most of the time requires re-authenticating with my credentials.
So while it may take less than a minute for Windows to shut down and restart again. It can take well over five minutes to get all my programs running again and web pages reloaded before I can begin to be productive again.
I’m quite envious of the people who can do their jobs with just one or two program and a few browser tabs.