Sometimes you may be asked to “cold boot” your PC when troubleshooting. This basically means you completely turn off your PC in order to allow the memory contents to be completely flushed out of the system.

When you do this, you shouldn’t just shut down your PC and immediately turn it back on. If you do this, the capacitors in the PC may not completely discharge. This is what should be done when doing a cold boot:

1.  Shut down the PC.
2. Unplug the power cord from the wall or flip the switch on the back of the power supply to off.
3. Wait at least 15 seconds.
4. Plug the power cord back in or flip the power supply switch to on.
5. Power on the PC.

After doing this, your system should be in a completely clean state.