Is it harmful to press the power button the force shut down the laptop?

Sometime when I'm in a hurry I just press the power button for several seconds to force the laptop to shut down. Of course it shut down immediately (with some sound). Is this harmful to the machine? Can it shorten its lifespan or cause damage?

 

It won't cause damage to the computer itself, but it's not wise as some app's still need to close out files otherwise they might become corrupt. A better way would be to set it to go to sleep when the lid is closed.

 

to my know it doesn't hurt the physical machine, but it will mess up windows pretty good. a better bet is to use sleep mode, it shut down in less than a second and you can shut it off latter at your convience.

Edit: it seems I got beat to the punch!

 

Thank you. Is "sleep mode" the same as "standby"? There are only these power options:

standby
hibernate
turn off hard disk

 

I believe it forces the hard drive to whip the heads into parking position.. unlike when you shutdown and the OS tells the hard drive to park and then turns off the power.

 

Depending on what the comp was busy performing. Corrupted files, disk heads damages ... could happen.

cheers ...

 

On a related note, how bad is it if one shuts down the laptop by pulling out the battery and power ?
I used to do that before someone told me that I had to keep the power button pressed for a while before the laptop would shut down

 

Same kind of thing, as in both situations, power is cut from the drive and the drive has to 'emergency' park the drive heads.

 

So its equivalent to the power button shutoff, and not worse ?

 

I would think that it is worse, because with power button shutoff it should at least have time to move the disk heads out of the way.

 

You can look at it as if you were running really fast and suddenly just stopped and laid down. Not good for the body.

In reality, you're just cutting system threads short mid-process, not giving them time to close properly, which could include important system processes. You lose any unsaved data, etc.

If by "harmful" you mean will it decrease the hardware lifespan? then no. If you mean could it cause problems? yes. If you mean is it likely to cause problems? No.

The best answer but least conclusive answer is: It depends on what you're doing when you press the power button.

 

It is a VERY VERY bad idea to just cut the power, for a number of reasons. One, the issue of the hard drives not being able to park softly, is additional wear on them. But that issue is minimal as the drives are designed for this, but not everyday.

The more important issue is one of, incomplete writes to the drive. All operating systems buffer disk I/O, and unless the OS is shut down you risk one or more of these buffers not being written to the drive. This can easily result in a corrupted registry. That particular issue used to be much more prevalent in older versions of windows, but should still be a concern. But the registry is not the ONLY file that may have data buffered in memory that would be lost.

Gary

 

I believe you need to run utility that checks and corrects errors on the HDD. Which ,probably, occurred because of this shutting down. It should be available in windows, don't remember how to find it.

Anyone knows?

 

You could run the chkdsk utility from the command prompt with the /f flag to have Windows find and attempt to fix errors on the HDD. It won't recover any corrupted files though, it just repairs the file access tables it maintains.

 

About crashing computers:

a) as was said before, it messes up Windows
in my experience when I was forced to keep the power button pressed (some problem with USB devices...) the restart took longer and it made a mes out of my harddrive.
b) I am pretty sure a laptop contains some capacitors - I doubt it is healthy to force a shutdown - while it shouldn't do any damage, there is no guarantee it won't.

 

No, I've used the power button to forcibly shutdown my computers on numerous occasions countless times and I have never encountered any issues related to or caused by me doing that. Of course if your computer has a reset button it's better to use that instead.

I've never:

a)Had programs get corrupted.
b)Had the OS become corrupted.
c)Experienced any hardware failures.

Obviously, don't do it if you don't need to, just use the regular shutdown method if you can.

 

The issues of file corruption has been mitigated quite a bit by the switch from FAT32 to NTFS. I as you have said, have had to do the forced power down and only ever incurred any issues a very small number of times. But I know that every time I have had to resort to doing so, I have held my breath as I restarted, knowing full well that there may have been a critical buffer that had not yet been flushed.

One other point on this topic. There has been an OS "tweak" widely circulated among the "tweaker crowd" to turn on an option for delayed writes to the hard drive to improve system performance. I've never been an advocate of such measures, but anyone who has done it needs to be even more aware of the potential for unflushed buffers when doing a hard power off rather than a controlled shutdown.

Gary

 

Just the hdd will be toast. After it gets one bad sector because of this shutdown behavior, it will be like cancer.

 

If that were true, why wouldn't desktop hard drives all over the country be dropping like flies after the spring thunderstorms that cause a huge number of power outages? There is no difference in a power outage and a hard power off.

I am not defending the practice of a hard power off, but my objection has NOTHING to do with hardware issues. The hardware can survive this quite easily. The issue is one of software.

Gary

 

I love the comparison

 

Shame it's inaccurate and misleading.

 

You are being to politically correct. It is just flat out wrong.

Gary

 

Standby ftw. When I'm in a hurry, I close the lid on my laptop and it goes into standby mode by the time I slip it into my bag.

When I'm not in a hurry, I close the lid on my laptop and it goes into standby mode by the time I slip it into my bag.

Hahaha

 

Its not that there will be 100% chance of harddisk damage but when the power is directly cutoff then sometimes the read write head scratches the platters and create bad sectors.

 

Jumping directly from 10th to ground floor and coming down from stairs is the logic that can be used actually.

 

Twenty years ago maybe. Today, not a snowball's chance in hell. All hard drives these days have fully aerodynamic heads that do not require any voltage to keep them floating long enough for the capacitor enabled head retraction to occur. You simply can't cause a head crash by disengaging the power.

No, it can't. The heads can't come in contact with the surface. There is no voltage holding them up in the first place. The force holding them up is the aerodynamic force generated by the spinning drive. Now, if you were to somehow manage to abruptly stop the drive, then yes the heads would not be "taking the stairs" they would make the "leap".

Gary

 

It's harmful to the OS and applications as it can cause file corruption. Happened to me before, the OS could not boot as some vital files were corrupt and loss everything on the hard drive.

 

Whenever I turn y M1730 off directly, it makes a hdd noise. Like "zack".

 

This sounds more like speakers when power is cut abruptly.

 

Yep, that is the sound of the heads being intantly retracted by the power loss detection circuit built into every single hard drive for the past ten years or more. It is powered by a capacitor, which acts as a small battery just for this purpose. It is not, as you were implying, the sound of the heads coming into contact with the drive surface.

Gary

 

Interesting... I didn't know that.

 

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5508874.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7113361.html

http://www.datarecovery.com.sg/data_recovery/hard_disk_head_crash.htm

Just Google "Hard drive head retracting power" if you want more info there is a TON of it out there.


While reading thru some of the links, I find out that newer drives dispense with the capacitor as a power source for the head retract. Instead they use the still spinning drive motor as a sort of mini generator to provide the power! Now that is a WAY COOL bit of engineering!

Gary