• bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      28 and I remember the ancient text. I remember having to unlearn this shit later that it’s totally okay to hard shutdown a PC and you won’t brick it by doing that.

      • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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        9 months ago

        What kind of a PC do you have where you can just do a hard shutdown?

        Doing that on any regular system can totally screw up stuff. Unless you are running some sort of funky read only system, or one of those fake write systems, a hard shutdown is a bad idea.

        Also with modern hardware it’s less of an issue, but with anything with moving parts, shutting it down properly can make sure those parts aren’t moving any more and secured for transportation for example. I remember back in the DOS era, we used to park our heads before shutting down the PC.

        • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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          9 months ago

          I’ve been slamming the power button for decades and it’s never been an issue. Anything even remotely modern will have storage drivers that mitigate the risks.

          • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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            9 months ago

            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.

            • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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              9 months ago

              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.

              • Damage@feddit.it
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                9 months ago

                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.

              • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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                9 months ago

                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.

                • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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                  9 months ago

                  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.