Well what do you mean by slamming the power button? Because I understand a hard shutdown to be turning off the power or holding the power button till the power turns off.
Just pressing the on/off button is the same as selecting shutdown from the menu, that’s properly shutting down the pc and not a hard shutdown.
Shutting the power off can fuck up a system pretty bad. Nothing much a driver can do about that, everything in flight is lost.
Back in the day (pre ATX) the power button actually turned the power off. That’s where the screen from the post comes from. When you used to shut down Windows, it couldn’t turn the power off itself, so it showed this screen so you could turn the power off yourself.
Man on any modern PC you can yank the power cord out of the wall and you are not likely to do any permanent damage. Not that you should do it, but it likely won’t hurt.
Well no, not permanent damage. I don’t think there were ever any PCs where dropping the power could permanently damage your PC.
What can happen is you screw up your data, either just your personal files or something in the OS. This can easily cause your computer to simply not boot. Depending on the issue, this can be fixed easily, or can require an entire restore/reinstall.
Now modern Windows is pretty good with detecting and repairing that shit, but still, it’s not something you’d ever want to have happen.
But pushing the button isn’t a hard shutdown, that’s just how you tell the computer to go do it’s shutdown thing. That’s not a hard shutdown at all, that’s a regular vanilla shutdown.
With old shit, when hard drives had moving parts and didn’t auto park their heads, not parking before turning it off and then moving the system could absolutely crash the head destroying the disk. Even that isn’t like permanent damage to the PC, because you could simply replace the drive, but still. But we’re talking 80s and early 90s, after that the default state was parked and the drive had to move it to an unparked state.
Yeah exactly, on older systems you could fuck up the HDD by shutting down hard. That’s why they used to include the shutdown screen. But modern systems and particularly modern applications handle persistence in a way that makes it much harder to leave the storage in an invalid state. You might lose something you tried to save, but you’re unlikely to brick your HDD or your OS installation.
As someone who works with industrial PCs that rely on UPSs, whose batteries often go bad, to properly shut down, let me tell you, windows DOESN’T appreciate that sort of treatment, after a while data corruption adds up and the system is fucked.
There was no “permanent” damage to older computers either. That was literally how you turned them off before ATX power supplies (hence this message).
Modern PCs do so many things in the background that at any given moment yanking the power could cause all sorts of problems. Usually minor things that you’d never notice immediately, but that doesn’t mean they’re not happening. Usually file transactions are committed to disk before they say they’re finished, but not always because of cache.
Obviously nothing like this will break the hardware, it’s the software that would get corrupted.
Well what do you mean by slamming the power button? Because I understand a hard shutdown to be turning off the power or holding the power button till the power turns off.
Just pressing the on/off button is the same as selecting shutdown from the menu, that’s properly shutting down the pc and not a hard shutdown.
Shutting the power off can fuck up a system pretty bad. Nothing much a driver can do about that, everything in flight is lost.
Back in the day (pre ATX) the power button actually turned the power off. That’s where the screen from the post comes from. When you used to shut down Windows, it couldn’t turn the power off itself, so it showed this screen so you could turn the power off yourself.
Man on any modern PC you can yank the power cord out of the wall and you are not likely to do any permanent damage. Not that you should do it, but it likely won’t hurt.
Well no, not permanent damage. I don’t think there were ever any PCs where dropping the power could permanently damage your PC. What can happen is you screw up your data, either just your personal files or something in the OS. This can easily cause your computer to simply not boot. Depending on the issue, this can be fixed easily, or can require an entire restore/reinstall. Now modern Windows is pretty good with detecting and repairing that shit, but still, it’s not something you’d ever want to have happen.
But pushing the button isn’t a hard shutdown, that’s just how you tell the computer to go do it’s shutdown thing. That’s not a hard shutdown at all, that’s a regular vanilla shutdown.
With old shit, when hard drives had moving parts and didn’t auto park their heads, not parking before turning it off and then moving the system could absolutely crash the head destroying the disk. Even that isn’t like permanent damage to the PC, because you could simply replace the drive, but still. But we’re talking 80s and early 90s, after that the default state was parked and the drive had to move it to an unparked state.
Yeah exactly, on older systems you could fuck up the HDD by shutting down hard. That’s why they used to include the shutdown screen. But modern systems and particularly modern applications handle persistence in a way that makes it much harder to leave the storage in an invalid state. You might lose something you tried to save, but you’re unlikely to brick your HDD or your OS installation.
SSDs do not like the power getting cut suddenly.
As someone who works with industrial PCs that rely on UPSs, whose batteries often go bad, to properly shut down, let me tell you, windows DOESN’T appreciate that sort of treatment, after a while data corruption adds up and the system is fucked.
There was no “permanent” damage to older computers either. That was literally how you turned them off before ATX power supplies (hence this message).
Modern PCs do so many things in the background that at any given moment yanking the power could cause all sorts of problems. Usually minor things that you’d never notice immediately, but that doesn’t mean they’re not happening. Usually file transactions are committed to disk before they say they’re finished, but not always because of cache.
Obviously nothing like this will break the hardware, it’s the software that would get corrupted.
Guillotine switch for power.
I remember the days. Thick ass wire going from the PSU to the front panel. I think they actually switched mains voltage.
Nowadays it’s two dinky little wires since it’s just momentarily shorting a couple pins on the motherboard.