Switching off computer without shutting down? What happens? (1 Viewer)

[Sparcod]

You all need to click the shut down button before switching off. I do it most of the time, its become a habbit.
What happens if you dont?

 

[Templar]

With most modern computers when you press the power button (not hold), it will initiate the shut down procedure by itself.

If you mean by pulling the plug just like that, technically if the hard disk is in the middle of an activity you could get data corruption etc, but after all the time I did a hard shut down there has been no errors.

 

[AntiHyper]

I had once, while it was defragmenting my slave drive using norton speedisk the power for the whole house failed.

This created data corruption and everytime winxp starts, it would open up CHKDSK for my slave drive to check any errors on it.

The first 5 times i let chkdsk to do its job, it never finds any errors so i just skip it all the time now.

As far as just pressing the power button, windows will acknowledge the user has pressed the power button then does what ever the user had preprogrammed.

Go to: Start\Control Panel>Performance and Maintenance>Power Options\Advanced

In the Power Button section you can choose any:
- Do nothing
- Ask me what to do
- Stand by
- Hibernate
- Shut down

 

[rnitya_25]

whow dude, that's bad.

once i had a windows update going on, it was taking ages, like 2 hours and i got pissed off and fell asleep on my chair itself. my dad came in, force quit the update and manually shut the computer down. as you would expect my comp screwed up, i nearly lost everything, it wouldn't turn on, i had to get my uncle's help to fix it up, get all my stuff from the hard drive and format the comp. i wouldn't advise pulling out the plug just like that or just pushing the off button to turn off (doesn't work on most modern comps), unless your comp is frozen or something.

 

[sunny]

Shutting down a computer properly came from the old DOS days before hard disks were not as advanced as today's. Since the drive head floats over the platters using air, suddenly spinning down the platters (ie, cutting the power) would cause a head crash, so you would have to issue a "park" command to park the drive head into a landing zone before actually shutting the computer down. Most modern hard disks automatically park the drive head by a spring. When power is cut spring automatically pulls the drive head into the landing zone.

With newer hard disks, the cache is bigger to help drive performance. But the bigger cache, the more chance you'll still have data in the cache that has not been written to the disk itself if power is suddenly cut.

 

[Serius]

Shutting down a computer properly came from the old DOS days before hard disks were not as advanced as today's. Since the drive head floats over the platters using air, suddenly spinning down the platters (ie, cutting the power) would cause a head crash, so you would have to issue a "park" command to park the drive head into a landing zone before actually shutting the computer down. Most modern hard disks automatically park the drive head by a spring. When power is cut spring automatically pulls the drive head into the landing zone.

With newer hard disks, the cache is bigger to help drive performance. But the bigger cache, the more chance you'll still have data in the cache that has not been written to the disk itself if power is suddenly cut.

i never knew that. so basically it means that turning off at the powerpoint, or pressing the button has no detrimental effects besides a loss of the data that is in the cache? so u might lose the last few lines of typing or something i guess

 

[Templar]

so u might lose the last few lines of typing or something i guess

16MB cache is enough for a novel.

 

[¬_¬]

You all need to click the shut down button before switching off. I do it most of the time, its become a habbit.
What happens if you dont?

The last time I had to do that was on my P-133! After that, the computers all seemed to be able to shut themselves down when you tap the shutdown button *shrugs*

 

[santaslayer]

Nothing happened on mine. I was on Word and the original word document opened up itself after I rebooted.

 

[sunny]

The last time I had to do that was on my P-133! After that, the computers all seemed to be able to shut themselves down when you tap the shutdown button *shrugs*

A feature on pretty much all new ATX power supplies and motherboards. You might have noticed that the feel of the power button has changed as well. ATX motherboards are constantly powered, even when off. The "soft" power button simply tells the motherboard to start powering all the other components of the computer. When you shut down the computer, the motherboard powers down the rest of the computer automatically.

Nothing happened on mine. I was on Word and the original word document opened up itself after I rebooted.

Word has a wonderful auto-save feature

 

[VanCarBus]

1. desktop - pulling plug in the ultimate frozen situation where ctrl alt del doesnt work and task manager doesnt work

2. laptop - take out the AC adaptor, remove the battery

3. throw ur devices out the window

 

[seremify007]

Shutting down a computer properly came from the old DOS days before hard disks were not as advanced as today's. Since the drive head floats over the platters using air, suddenly spinning down the platters (ie, cutting the power) would cause a head crash, so you would have to issue a "park" command to park the drive head into a landing zone before actually shutting the computer down. Most modern hard disks automatically park the drive head by a spring. When power is cut spring automatically pulls the drive head into the landing zone.

With newer hard disks, the cache is bigger to help drive performance. But the bigger cache, the more chance you'll still have data in the cache that has not been written to the disk itself if power is suddenly cut.

I didn't know that.... and how were we supposed to shut down the computers? I used to just turn the power off whenever I was not using it anymore... I don't remember a shutdown option in Windows 3 either.

 

[withoutaface]

16MB cache is enough for a novel.

16mb is enough for 4 bibles.

 

[flipsyde]

1. desktop - pulling plug in the ultimate frozen situation where ctrl alt del doesnt work and task manager doesnt work

2. laptop - take out the AC adaptor, remove the battery

3. throw ur devices out the window

VCB good to see you back lol