Can I just unplug my computer to shut it down?
No. Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom
here for askleo.com. If you want a more detailed answer than just no?
Hang on. Here's the question.
"I've been having problems with the power
button on my computer turning itself on and off.
I've stopped shutting down my computer
because I have difficulty turning it back on.
I just restarted every morning,
but I really don't like leaving the computer on all the time.
If I were to cut the power to the computer
and then plug it back in the next morning, would
i need to use the on off button.
And would I be damaging anything?"
If you just unplug your computer,
you risk data loss, and in the worst case, you might actually damage your computer.
One of the early jokes about Windows was
that in order to shut down a computer, you have to click the start button.
You had to click Start to Stop.
The hidden issue there is that stopping
a computer is a process, not an event.
So when you click the start button and then click on shutdown,
you are indeed starting a process that shuts down your computer.
That process should not be interrupted.
It's doing things.
It's doing important things.
It's writing things to disk.
It's saving your state.
It's turning off hardware in a controlled fashion.
It is possible that if that process is
interrupted or if it's never begun at all, then the sudden removal of power can cause
information not to be written to your disk or the worst case hardware to be damaged.
It's not something you want to do unless you absolutely have to.
Now, I do want to talk about the power button on your computer.
If you touch it, push it briefly and let go.
That on most computers is the moral
equivalent of going to the Start menu and hitting shut down.
In other words, the computer should begin the process of shutting itself down simply
by pushing the power button and releasing it relatively quickly.
If, on the other hand,
you're finding yourself having to hold the power button down for multiple seconds
until the computer shuts down suddenly, that's not a good thing.
That's very close to pulling the plug.
In many ways, many of the same risks that I've just talked about from pulling
the plug can result from holding down that power button and forcing the machine off.
Now I get sometimes you have to.
Sometimes the power button doesn't work.
Sometimes the computer is hung, which is actually the more common case.
If your computer has crashed and nothing
is responding at all, and there's no way to shut it down, then,
yeah, holding the power button is the thing to do.
We don't like it. It's risky.
It's one of the reasons we do backups, but sometimes it's the only solution.
Now, the one thing that wasn't clear
from your question is, did you try to shut down in Windows?
In other words, if your computer
responds to your going start shut down and it goes through the shutdown sequence
and it does everything that it's supposed to do, it
may turn itself off so you don't have to unplug it.
If it goes through the motions of shutting
down, but at the very end you see nothing but a black screen and machine is still
running, then you may actually be okay to pull the plug again.
Don't recommend it, but Windows was given the opportunity to shut down clearly.
So if at all possible, make sure to go through
the shutdown in Windows to save everything to disk and give it
enough time to finish before you pull the plug.
The bottom line is that if you have
to pull the plug for any reason or if you have to long press the power button to get
your machine to shut down, something's wrong that should be fixed.
Shutting down your computer cleanly is an important part to making sure that you
don't lose data and you don't damage the computer.
I said it a couple of times already.
You may not think that your computer is
doing anything when you pull the plug, it's always doing something.
If Windows is running,
it's always doing something, and that means there's a risk of
incomplete writes to the hard disk or whatever.
Now, unfortunately,
our experience would have us believe that it's actually pretty safe to pull
the plug because most of the time nothing happens.
Most of the time when you pull the plug, especially if you're not running a lot
of programs, and I'm sure you're not, then it's mostly safe.
You'll reboot in the morning, you'll plug it back in and reboot
in the morning, and everything will look just fine.
Most of the time.
Some of the time there may be a hidden issue.
Something may have been damaged that you don't run into immediately.
When you turn on the machine the next morning, a program may stop working.
A spot on the disk may go bad, and you may not encounter that for quite some time.
You may find that when you reboot the machine in the morning chkdsk
will automatically run because
the hard disk wasn't written to completely at the end of the day.
That's okay, but because it wasn't written too completely, chkdsk,
could uncover some errors, so you may find yourself having some errors.
And of course, in the worst case,
I'm not going to say it any again, you can actually damage things.
So the bottom line here is very simple.
If the power button isn't working, you should probably get it fixed.
If your machine is crashing in such a way that shut down doesn't work and the power
button doesn't work, you should get that looked at.
Shutting down your computer is a process, and it's a process that really does need
to run to completion before you turn the machine off.
I hope that was helpful.
I hope that helps clear up a little bit of the Mystique Around the Power button.
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For comments and, of course, much more, visit askleo.com/5345 I'm Leo Notenboom.
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