Windows 7: Few Questions

I just had two questions...

1. Does it matter if I press, and hold the power button to shut down my computer? Also would it matter if I was running a program during the forced shut down, such as a game?



2. Also I was wondering if it mattered how many times I shut down, and booted up my computer a day... If it matters if I boot it up, play on it for a few hours, shut it down for a few hours, than boot it up again, and repeat processes throughout the day.

Thanks in advance for answering these questions, despite how stupid they are, it still drives me crazy not knowing, and I would hate to do these stupid little things, that could end up damaging my computer. Thanks again.

Hello Rapth, and welcome to Seven Forums.

The shut down method you are using is called a hard shut down. It's not recommended to use that as a normal method to shut down you computer. It can cause disk fragmentation, corrupted files if they were being read/written to when you hard shut down, etc.... It's just hard on your system, HDD, and files to shut down this way.

Instead, it would be better to close all programs first, and use Shut Down in the Start Menu or a shortcut. It's not going to hurt anything to use the shut down I mentioned off and on throughout the day.

However, if you are constantly off and on the computer throughout the day, then you might consider putting the computer to Sleep instead to be able to bring the computer back up faster and use shut down at night when you go to bed or not using it for an extended period.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Well considering my computer didn't blow up when I tried to turn it on again, and everything seems to be running fine. I am going to assume the computer is fine. Can doing this often cause damage, or is it more or less just running a risk of files becoming corrupted?

If you go into the Windows power options, there is a "Chose what the power buttons do" setting. In there you can set "When I press the power button" to shutdown. Then a momentary press of your power button will cause a graceful normal Windows shutdown. Another option is to put a Shutdown shortcut on your desktop. I have done both. On my laptop I just press the power button momentarily and windows shuts down. On my desktop I just click the shortcut.
Shut Down Windows Shortcut

A hard shut down won't damage your hardware, but as Brink explained it can leave data in an inconsistent state.

If, when you restart the computer, Windows can't recover from this state, you do run the risk of data loss or data corruption.

Like many retired people I use my computer on and off throughout the day. If I'm away for more than a few minutes at a time I just use Sleep then power down normally overnight.

I'd go to Control Panel>Power Options and set Balanced Plan to it's defaults.

Power Plan Settings - Change

Then click Advanced options link to expand under Sleep the Hybrid Sleep to Enable and Hibernate to set at around an hour or two.

This way it goes to sleep while saving your work if you walk away for awhile, but then you don't have to come back to shut it down if you want because it will go on to Hibernate by saving all of your open work and shutting down. It also starts up much faster from Hibernation.

The Hybrid Sleep writes your work to HD as well as RAM during sleep so it isn't lost if there's a power failure.

If you feel any sluggishness you can change the Power Plan to High Performance while keeping the same SLeep and Hibernate default timeouts.

I'm curious...
Why are doing a "Hard Shut down"?
Is your PC hanging / unresponsive?
Is it just out of habit, or because it is "fast and easy"?
Or, some other reason???

No matter what the reason, i suggest you learn to use Backup Imaging to be able to recover your PC without re-installing OS and programs.

I have NEVER powered down the computer like that before, as it has never frozen, and I have no reason. The reason I did this time, was I was having a bad day, in a bad mood, booted up Tera, decided I didn't want to play, and held down the power button to shut down the PC.