It is now safe to turn off your computer
It is now safe to turn off your computer
Nicked this from bsky at https://bsky.app/profile/retr0.id/post/3kghyoisqoc24
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I wonder how many people will see this and not know what it is based off
I wonder if there's a way to replace the "these programs are preventing your computer from shutting down" with this image. The legit one, preferably lol
I know you can change the images in Windows 95 so you could replace the proper one with this. I suspect the messages in Windows 10/11 are a bit more sophisticated though!
My immediate thought too. No one under 25 at least, and I feel like that's being generous.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SSDs do not like the power getting cut suddenly.
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.
There was no "permanent" damage to older computers either. That was literally how you turned them off before ATX power supplies (hence this message).
Modern PCs do so many things in the background that at any given moment yanking the power could cause all sorts of problems. Usually minor things that you'd never notice immediately, but that doesn't mean they're not happening. Usually file transactions are committed to disk before they say they're finished, but not always because of cache.
Obviously nothing like this will break the hardware, it's the software that would get corrupted.
I remember the days. Thick ass wire going from the PSU to the front panel. I think they actually switched mains voltage.
Nowadays it’s two dinky little wires since it’s just momentarily shorting a couple pins on the motherboard.
Guillotine switch for power.
no its not okay, it fucks things up big time
24 and I didn't recognize it.
I'm way under 25 and I get this. Those days before ACPI
20 and I know 🤓
I'm not sure, do enlighten me
Old PCs couldn't switch themselves off, so they stopped the operating system and asked the user to cut the power. This image is in the style of the Windows 95 shut down screen.
Holy, that's so cool
