If Your Computer Has A Blue Screen, Don’t Cut Off The Power Immediately! Teach You How To Force Shutdown Correctly To Avoid Hard Drive Damage
Long pressing the power button or cutting off the power directly: Which operation damages the computer more?
When we use computers on a daily basis, we will inevitably encounter a blue screen in the system or the embarrassing situation of the program becoming unresponsive. In response to this "stuck" situation, many people's first reaction is to press the power button for a long time to force a shutdown, and those who are more impatient may even directly cut off the power strip switch or unplug the power cord. Both of these operations can cause the computer to stop working. However, the damage caused to the inside of the computer is very different.
What is the "buffer period" doing during forced shutdown?
After receiving this signal, the system will try to perform a standard shutdown process . It will first shut down the background services one by one, then notify the running software to save data, and finally cut off the power supply. This is a kind of "orderly evacuation" achieved by the cooperation of software and hardware.
However, cutting off the power directly is equivalent to causing the system to suddenly die without any prior preparation. All data currently flowing in memory, as well as cache that has not yet been written back to the hard disk, will disappear in an instant. At a mild level, the consequences may cause the document being edited or unsaved game progress to be lost; at a more severe level, the system file being written may be damaged, so that the system will crash directly when the computer is turned on next time, unable to enter the desktop.
What happened to the hard drive at the moment of power outage?
When the disk is working, the disk is rotating at a high speed, reaching thousands or even tens of thousands of revolutions per minute. The magnetic head flies above the disk, and the distance between the two is only a few nanometers. If a power outage suddenly occurs, the magnetic head will not be able to return to the docking area in a normal state, but will fall directly onto the disk as if "falling". When the computer is powered on for the next time, at the moment when the disk changes from a static state to a high-speed rotation, the air flow becomes unstable and the magnetic head has not yet completed its reset. In this case, it is very likely to cause scratches on the surface of the disk, thereby forming physical bad sectors, and ultimately causing permanent damage to key files. Even a storage device called an SSD solid state drive is not afraid of physical scratches. However, if a power outage occurs suddenly, it may cause the FTL mapping table to be lost, or cause the firmware to be damaged, resulting in a serious failure such as "disk drop" and the capacity becoming 0.
Potential harm to motherboard and CPU
When in a normal shutdown situation, the computer's unit called power management will gradually reduce the voltage of each component according to a predetermined sequence until the voltage returns to zero. However, if there is a sudden power outage, especially by pulling out the plug, the current will suddenly change. If this happens for a long time, it will accelerate the extremely complex and elusive electromigration process of electronic components, thereby shortening the service life of motherboards, graphics cards, and CPUs to varying degrees. Especially for those computers that are already very old, their component performance has already shown a downward trend, and it is very easy to cause physical damage as a result.
Risk of system crash and file loss
Abnormal power outages occur again and again, which will cause the operating system kernel files to be damaged during read and write operations. The situation is similar to the load-bearing walls of a house that are suddenly knocked down when building a house. After a long time, you will notice that the computer has become extremely unstable. Blue screens often appear without legitimate reasons. Various weird code errors will pop up one after another, and even cause the screen to appear black when booting. After the damage to the system files reaches a certain level, there is no other way except to reinstall the system. What's particularly critical is that the photos, work documents, and project data stored in the computer may become unreadable after a power outage, resulting in irreparable losses.
Correct troubleshooting and efficiency improvement techniques
Now that we are aware of its dangers, when the computer freezes again, we can follow more scientific and reasonable steps:
First try to call out the task manager with the highlighted effect: press the key combination of Ctrl, Alt and Del, select the task manager, find the program that is in the "unresponsive" state and end the corresponding task. This is the mildest form of recovery.
2. Use the reset shortcut key : When some specific drivers (such as graphics drivers) are stuck, you can try to use the Win + Ctrl + Shift + B key combination to restart the graphics card driver. This can usually save the black screen problem.
3. Forced shutdown out of helplessness : If the above-mentioned methods do not work, then choose to press the power button for a long time. Wait for a while and let the computer finish the final cooking work.
4. Optimize the system settings: In the power options in the control panel, adjust the "Select the function of the power button" to ensure that pressing the power button (not pressing it for a long time) displays the "off" state instead of the "sleep" state to prevent misoperations.
Forcing the power of a computer to turn off is a measure that is taken when other methods fail. Simply cutting off the power of the computer is something that must not be touched. The reason is to ensure the good condition of the computer and the security of the data. Therefore, the operating system must be given a few seconds to allow the device to turn off the power. The occasional forced shutdown may not cause major adverse effects, but do not let this practice become a daily routine.
