My electric toothbrush was acting up, so I tried to reboot it

Raymond Chen

My electric toothbrush was acting up. The Internet says that I needed to reboot my electric toothbrush.

Pretty much no part of that last sentence made any sense 40 years ago.

My friend who worked on the development of the USB specification once sent me an email that said simply, “Just now, I had to reboot my mouse. Thought you’d like to know.” This is the same colleague who some time later told me about USB floppy drive price discrimination.

A colleague of mine has a cadence sensor on his biking shoes. He received a notification on the sensor app and proceeded to install a firmware update. He made a point to tell anyone within earshot, “I’m performing a firmware update on my shoe.”

Oh, by the way, my attempts to reboot the electric toothbrush were unsuccessful. I had to replace it.

Topics

Non-Computer

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

11 comments

Discussion is closed. Login to edit/delete existing comments.

Michele L'Intenditore February 4, 2025

I was thinking that to reboot a mouse one has simply to unplug and reinsert the USB connector. About rebooting stuff I still have a VHS recorder bought in the '90s, and in the instruction manual, that of course is a paper manual there are instructions to reboot it in case it acts weird, basically unplug from the mains, wait two minutes and plug it back: so isn't actually a new thing having to reboot household items. The problem of today is that you don't get a decent instruction manual anymore, and in a lot of cases the one you...
Read more
I was thinking that to reboot a mouse one has simply to unplug and reinsert the USB connector. About rebooting stuff I still have a VHS recorder bought in the ’90s, and in the instruction manual, that of course is a paper manual there are instructions to reboot it in case it acts weird, basically unplug from the mains, wait two minutes and plug it back: so isn’t actually a new thing having to reboot household items. The problem of today is that you don’t get a decent instruction manual anymore, and in a lot of cases the one you find on the internet is lacking important informations.

By the way I followed the link about Macintosh USB floppy drives, and I was expecting something about MFM/GCR dual mode for the Mac version to read older 800K Mac floppies)

Read less
Ivan Kljajic January 30, 2025

Cheers. This reminded me I need to buy a burner toothbrush to unclog the top speaker of my smart phone.
Sharquee Yeilufiche January 29, 2025

It’s clear you never had the “pleasure” to have to reboot a sex toy, probably the last thing on anyone’s mind in the heat of the moment…
- Dmitry January 29, 2025
  
  I guess, sometimes an electric toothbrush counts as one. It just depends on who’s the actual user. And with bad cooling it might even add a lot to ”the heat of the moment”, I guess.
Christopher Warrington January 29, 2025

I recently had to reboot my laptop’s charger by unplugging it from the wall. No, I could not unplug it from and replug it in to the laptop. No, a different laptop from the same manufacturer didn’t work. The charger itself had hung and had to be power cycled.