Booting W 2K systems

[yamafopa]

I am hoping to settle a bit of a disagreement here. My company does work on pc controlled scientific instruments. One of the engineers here asked me if it was alright to power to instrument off without first quitting windows. It is possible to shut the pc off in this way because it gets it's power directly from the instrument.

Now, I have noticed since starting using W2K that the pc will recover from a premature shut down far better than it's 9x predecessors. I believe (but don't know) that this has something to do with changes made to the way the Registry operates.

So I guess my questions are...

1. Is it ok to routinely power off the pc without first shutting down windows?
2. If so, why?
3. Is it likely that registry error(s) would or could result if the machine was constantly powered off in this way?

Hope someone has some informed insight as I am just guessing.

Thanks,
yamafopa!

 

[edemiere]

Just turning off the power to any system that is up and running is never a good idea, regardless of fault tolerance. If you have an option to shutdown that should always be your first choice.

I mean, how do you prefer to go to sleep? Do you prefer laying down and falling asleep or do you like being whacked over the head? I mean, being hit over the head you will recover from, now the question is would you rather do that every night? Sure, it'd be faster than waiting to fall asleep, but in the end going about something the right way is always proper.

These systems were built to try and recover from an outage or something when you lose power unexpectedly, but as for making this routing practice, I wouldn't recommend it as I am sure noone else here would.

The main reason is that if settings or changes are not written to disk you can/will lose data and that's not a good thing, wouldn't you agree?

Cheers!

 

[yamafopa]

I most certainly agree! I try always to shut down a machine properly and don't know why any educated user would want to do otherwise.

I suspect that this user somehow believes that his OS is capable to recovering from an improper shut down, so why not.

I would just like to be able to give some more technical detail...especially where the system registry is concerned.

yamafopa!

 

[edemiere]

Well as I stated above:

"The main reason is that if settings or changes are not written to disk you can/will lose data and that's not a good thing..."

And that would include and registry changes that didn't get committed to the disk.

Not getting data written properly to the disk should be reason enough. Show them that when they choose shutdown how the screen says "Saving settings" and "Writing data to disk" (that is if I recall correctly) and therein lies the proof!

Cheers!

 

[yamafopa]

Hopefully that will be enough. These scientists can be a stubborn lot!
Thanks for your time...

yamafopa!

 

[MontrealSoft]

Hint: Using a cheap UPS and the included software, you can probably set the software to shutdown the pc immediatly on power failure....

Battery initiate the shutdown and will keep computer up until complete "normal" shutdown.

Luc


MontrealSoft.com

http://www.montrealsoft.com