0

For sure a lot of us has experienced a freeze situation for some reason, and we don't have any other solution but to turn off our PC manually (maybe for lack of experience), so:

  • Is it harmful to the computer?
  • Is there an another solution otherwise turning off the computer manually?
Mohammad
  • 593

1 Answers1

1

None. Contrary to popular belief, it is not harmful to computer at all.

However, you may lost some unsaved work, but anyway most of software silently do backup copy quite frequently. There are also possibility to affect filesystems if power cut-off occurs during write operation, but every modern filesystem can deal with it and automatically fix its inconsistency caused by power cut-off.

So to sum up: there is nothing to worry about, if your computer freezes, then power it off without hesitation.

  • 1
    No entirely true. While modern file systems (which excludes FAT, which is used on most/many external storage media) will be able to recover from corruption, the resulting directory structure and file content may leave another program in an inconsistent state. I dare you to shut off your machine while dpkg(1) or apt-get(8) are running. – David Foerster May 26 '14 at 11:07
  • @DavidFoerster yes, right, but it is still not harm to computer but to the software. Anyway, dpkg also can deal with those inconsistencies. –  May 26 '14 at 11:10