TechBlog

Have you ever wondered why the techies cringe when you shut your computer down by holding the power button? Or perhaps you might not think about shutting your computer down when the power company shuts off your power. Well, hopefully that doesn’t happen often. In any event, you should always shut down your computer the right way by using the Shutdown button in Windows, OSX, or whatever operating system you’re using.

Why is this important? When you shut down your computer normally your operating system (OS) has time to save those files it’s currently working with. For example, say you’re installing a vital Windows Update (or System Update for you fanboys). It goes through and updates a bunch of your files replacing them with newer ones. If you kill the power to the computer while that’s happening those files might become corrupt because they haven’t been properly written to your hard drive. Even if you’re not using files yourself, your computer might be scanning files for viruses, indexing them, or rearranging them to make your computer faster. At any given time, your computer is likely to be opening and closing dozens or more files per minute! While *nix-based operating systems like Mac OSX might handle incomplete file input/output better than Windows, problems will still occur. Many of the issues our office sees are likely caused by improper shutdown. Sometimes the repair is easy, often times not.

And all that is just the software side! What happens to hard drives when the power is suddenly removed from them? If shut down properly, the hard drives will park their “needles,” or “heads,” like your old turntable. And while they can do this pretty quickly, cutting the power might not give them enough time to park. Those “heads” are hovering over your data relying on the physics of moving air to ensure they don’t drag across the hard drive’s internals. Doing so could damage the disc and then you’d surely lose data!

So next time you flip the switch on your powerstrip, unplug your power cable, or turn off your circuit breaker, think twice and make sure you’ve shut down your computers.