In recent times KDX (my station) had trouble downloading audio from YouTube and tried a lot of different ways of doing it, but for awhile the ground shifted as methods that worked then failed and then worked.
This morning started alright as our early newscasts downloaded but every other program on the playlist refused to download from many different sources, so I closed the station and spent a few hours rebooting computers and checking for new versions of key software.
Returning to service everything now works perfectly without fail, at least for now, and the lesson seems to be - Windows needs to be restarted once in awhile. I guess. Maybe. So it seems. I don't know what else to think.
I agree. It's wise to restart Windows (at least version 10) once a week. Windows 7 seemed to be OK for longer stretches. And I have a version of Windows Server (equivalent to Windows 7 in almost all aspects, just a superset of its features) that has been running for literally months with no hiccups, supporting Artisan Radio streaming and geo blocking.
The things that tend to cause instability over time (no quantitative measures here, just observation):
- Extensive use of networking, both WiFi and Ethernet (although WiFi seems a bit worse)
- USB traffic (particularly external hard disks)
- Program installation or removal, even when Windows doesn't force a reboot. That includes system updates.
I know Windows receives a lot of bad press, but it's still the O/S of choice due to availability of applications, unless there is one that you really really want to use, and it can run on, say, Linux or MacOS or even UNIX (they're all flavors of the same thing anyway). Just some more proprietary than others (can you say MacOS anyone?). The only thing that I really hate about it, again on version 10, is the forcing of system updates upon you. Windows 7 ran just fine without that, and there were no surprising reboots in the middle of the night to take down your 24/7 station. There are ways to delay updates in 10, but I just check for updates frequently, and manually schedule them when they appear so that I'm ready for them - it just takes some discipline and planning. And after all, you really do want to install updates as quickly as possible with computers that touch the Internet.