Why use "Turn Off Computer"?

[curiousgeorge408]

When I want to shut down my laptop, I have at least 3 ways available
to me.

Of course, I can click on Start>Turn Off Computer. That has several
downsides. First, it requires that I click on Turn Off again.
Second, often XP takes a long time to shut down from that point. The
amount of time seems to vary greatly; I don't know why.
Occassionally, it seems like XP will "never" complete the shutdown.
Really, I simply run out of patience after 90-120 seconds -- although
if a process error occurs during normal shutdown, my experience has
been that the diaglog box (ergo the system) remains up until I click
OK (or some button).

(That is disastrous for a laptop, if I close the cover immediately
after clicking the second Turn Off. It will simply run down the
battery, and the disk is more vulnerable to damage due to movement in
the interim.)

Alternatively, I can Hibernate the system. (On my laptop, I press fn
+F1.) That has the advantage of reducing start-up time when I turn on
the laptop again later. But I am never confident of the start-up
environment. That is, I wonder what side-effects might be carried
over from one start-up to the next.

Finally, I can simply hold the power button down for several seconds.
XP seems to shut down almost immediately after that. I am sure there
might be some reliability issues if I had applications running at the
time. But I have never encountered a problem as long as the system is
quiescent at the time I power off.

Since the last method is the quickest (although starting-up again is
not as fast after Hibernation, of course), is there any reason not to
simply power off the laptop instead of using Turn Off Computer?

 

[philo]

When I want to shut down my laptop, I have at least 3 ways available
to me.

Of course, I can click on Start>Turn Off Computer. That has several
downsides. First, it requires that I click on Turn Off again.
Second, often XP takes a long time to shut down from that point. The
amount of time seems to vary greatly; I don't know why.
Occassionally, it seems like XP will "never" complete the shutdown.
Really, I simply run out of patience after 90-120 seconds -- although
if a process error occurs during normal shutdown, my experience has
been that the diaglog box (ergo the system) remains up until I click
OK (or some button).

(That is disastrous for a laptop, if I close the cover immediately
after clicking the second Turn Off. It will simply run down the
battery, and the disk is more vulnerable to damage due to movement in
the interim.)

Alternatively, I can Hibernate the system. (On my laptop, I press fn
+F1.) That has the advantage of reducing start-up time when I turn on
the laptop again later. But I am never confident of the start-up
environment. That is, I wonder what side-effects might be carried
over from one start-up to the next.

Finally, I can simply hold the power button down for several seconds.
XP seems to shut down almost immediately after that. I am sure there
might be some reliability issues if I had applications running at the
time. But I have never encountered a problem as long as the system is
quiescent at the time I power off.

Since the last method is the quickest (although starting-up again is
not as fast after Hibernation, of course), is there any reason not to
simply power off the laptop instead of using Turn Off Computer?

Your best option is to just use hibernate.

If you simply turn the machine off...
windows does not shut down orderly & you can end up with file system
corruption.
There could be data loss...
or even an unusable computer

 

[Ghostrider]

When I want to shut down my laptop, I have at least 3 ways available
to me.

Of course, I can click on Start>Turn Off Computer. That has several
downsides. First, it requires that I click on Turn Off again.
Second, often XP takes a long time to shut down from that point. The
amount of time seems to vary greatly; I don't know why.
Occassionally, it seems like XP will "never" complete the shutdown.
Really, I simply run out of patience after 90-120 seconds -- although
if a process error occurs during normal shutdown, my experience has
been that the diaglog box (ergo the system) remains up until I click
OK (or some button).

(That is disastrous for a laptop, if I close the cover immediately
after clicking the second Turn Off. It will simply run down the
battery, and the disk is more vulnerable to damage due to movement in
the interim.)

Alternatively, I can Hibernate the system. (On my laptop, I press fn
+F1.) That has the advantage of reducing start-up time when I turn on
the laptop again later. But I am never confident of the start-up
environment. That is, I wonder what side-effects might be carried
over from one start-up to the next.

Finally, I can simply hold the power button down for several seconds.
XP seems to shut down almost immediately after that. I am sure there
might be some reliability issues if I had applications running at the
time. But I have never encountered a problem as long as the system is
quiescent at the time I power off.

Since the last method is the quickest (although starting-up again is
not as fast after Hibernation, of course), is there any reason not to
simply power off the laptop instead of using Turn Off Computer?

Patience is a requirement when using Windows, regardless whether or not
the computer is a desktop or a laptop. For Windows to shut down properly,
all of the applications and services that are running at that time need
to be closed. The more services and applications running, then the longer
it willl take. The obvious solution is to streamline only what needs to be
running on the laptop. And at the time when one needs to turn it off, help
out by first disconnecting from the Internet, shutting down applications,
and so forth. This will shorten the duration of the shut down. This is the
prescribed method for keeping Windows in a workable state.

 

[PA Bear]

Control Panel > Power Options > Advanced > Power buttons > When I press the
power button... > Select "Shut down" and OK your way out.

When you're ready to shut down, /close all open applications/ then just
press the power button & you're done. Yes, it might take just a long to
shut down but WYSIWYG if you have all sorts of unnecessary things loading at
boot and running in the background.

 

[db ´¯`·.. >]

there is a 4th way:

when i'm ready to
walk away, i simply close
my laptop lid and it goes
into hibernation all by itself -
automatically.




--

<)))º>·´¯`·.¸. , . .·´¯`·.. ><)))º>`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·...¸><)))º>

..

 

[hgnlordowen]

The only problem with using hibernate instead of turn off computer is that
there are Terminate Stay Resident programs that continue to run in the
background. If they run continuously, they tend to become unstable and may
eventually cause the computer to crash or slow down. Restart every few days,
but otherwise hibernate will do just fine. You could also go to
start>run>eventvwr and see if it has anything listed in it that would suggest
why your computer is taking so long to start up and shut down. You can also
use start>run>msconfig to turn off things that you aren't using. Just be
careful with this since when some things are turned off, they cause other
things to not work until they are turned back on again.

 

[HeyBub]

Since the last method is the quickest (although starting-up again is
not as fast after Hibernation, of course), is there any reason not to
simply power off the laptop instead of using Turn Off Computer?

Removing power is similar to stopping your car by running into a tree.

At some point you will interrupt a crucial system process. That, in turn,
will cause immense pain.

 

[Unknown]

How could programs run in the background in hibernate mode if power is off?

 

[hgnlordowen]

The programs don't run while the power is off. They run before you set it to
hibernate and after it resumes. Shutting it down or restarting it closes some
of these programs.

 

[hgnlordowen]

I'm curious about which crucial system processes you're referring to. The
computer shouldn't be writing system files and reading from them won't damage
them. The only things I can think of in XP that would cause a write error in
a system file would be Defrag, Windows Update/installer, CHKDisk if it is
performing a write test, or the background program that optimizes hard disk
usage (supposing it is even turned on). All but the last one would be pretty
hard to have running and not be aware of. I don't doubt that those programs
are out there and that interrupting them will cause severe problems, but the
only time I've actually seen it happen was on a computer that was on its way
out anyway from pre-existing driver errors and that was Windows 98SE. Has
anyone else actually seen a catastrophic failure due to improper shutdown in
XP or know any other programs that might cause this problem?

Oh, wait, I lied. I've seen a lot of Dell computers lose hal.dll if their
power is interrupted. I'm at a loss to explain why the computer would be
modifying its hardware abstraction layer instructions so often though. Of
course, this answer just raises more questions... Gotta love Microsoft (while
NOT discussing their products *rolls eyes*). Well the question about what
else might cause this problem still stands...

 

[HeyBub]

I'm curious about which crucial system processes you're referring to.
The computer shouldn't be writing system files and reading from them
won't damage them. The only things I can think of in XP that would
cause a write error in a system file would be Defrag, Windows
Update/installer, CHKDisk if it is performing a write test, or the
background program that optimizes hard disk usage (supposing it is
even turned on). All but the last one would be pretty hard to have
running and not be aware of. I don't doubt that those programs are
out there and that interrupting them will cause severe problems, but
the only time I've actually seen it happen was on a computer that was
on its way out anyway from pre-existing driver errors and that was
Windows 98SE. Has anyone else actually seen a catastrophic failure
due to improper shutdown in XP or know any other programs that might
cause this problem?

I'm not an expert, but:
In addition to the three you mentioned:

1. A scheduled event
2. Some software running an automatic update
3. An IE page refresh
4. A Windows delayed-write
5. Error recovery in progress

 

[hgnlordowen]

1. A scheduled event
Okay, I can kind of see that being possible.

2. Some software running an automatic update
No surprises there.

3. An IE page refresh
What?!! Why would that be writing to critical system files? A new page with
a typed address or something I could understand because it would write a
value to the registry, but to just refresh a page... Okay, now Microsoft has
me worried. Unless it has something to do with how Windows and IE are so
dependent on each other... I'm not saying it isn't true but that would be one
of the great mysteries of windows computing.

4. A Windows delayed-write
Ya, that could definately do it.

5. Error recovery in progress
I'll take your word on that.

 

[HeyBub]

3. An IE page refresh
What?!! Why would that be writing to critical system files? A new
page with a typed address or something I could understand because it
would write a value to the registry, but to just refresh a page...
Okay, now Microsoft has me worried. Unless it has something to do
with how Windows and IE are so dependent on each other... I'm not
saying it isn't true but that would be one of the great mysteries of
windows computing.

I don't know. But when a page refreshes, some of what's done is under the
control of the page. The page could update a database, log its refresh to a
scratch file, download an event that triggers an Active-X control (which, in
turn, does god-knows-what), yak-yak-yak.

Windows an IE are not dependent on each other - they ARE each other. While
you can disable IE, much of its code is integrated in the OS.