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What damage will powering down instead of shutting down do?

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 202612433 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

What is it that Windows is doing when it shuts down? Assuming I've saved everything, what negative impact does powering down instead of shutting down properly have? We've all done it at some point and personally I don't know anyone whose machine has died as a result. (Just to be clear, I know I shouldn't, I'm just not sure why.)

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Fix for: What damage will powering down instead of shutting down do?

Low Risk

It's unlikely that the whole machine will die, but if there's anything still in file write buffers, you'll lose that data... and basically the machine probably won't know the difference between you powering it off and it shutting down due to a power cut. Services won't get the chance to shut themselves down cleanly. For instance, if you're running a web server, when it gets asked to shut down it may well complete any existing requests (with a timeout) rather than the connection just going away.…

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