If your OS freezes or nothing responds, can you power down your computer by holding down the power button?

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MrCanEHdian

MrCanEHdian

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Good day everyone, thank you for stopping by.

So I was playing Civ 5 and using CoreTemp to monitor my CPU's cores' temperatures and Win8.1 froze, the keyboard wouldn't respond and I couldn't shutdown or restart. I waited about 15 minutes and read online for solutions, then eventually powered the system down by holding the power button.

All seems fine, but I'm somewhat worried now.
Is it ok to power down this way, or should it be avoided?
 
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InvalidError
If the system is completely locked up, you do not really have any other choice anyway... you either hold the soft-power button until the PSU turns off, push the reset button or use the hard-switch on the back. In all three cases, the system shuts down without having a chance to finish whatever it was doing at the moment of the crash.

If that something happened to be updating file system structures, some files may get corrupted but as I said above, there is nothing any alternate shutdown method could do about it.

Whichever method you choose, the result should be the same.
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jjs0891

jjs0891

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I personally don't know much about this but I heard it can cause hard drive corruption. But I've done this a lot on all my computers and i've never noticed any effects. You should probably be more worried about your computer freezing.
 
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MrCanEHdian

MrCanEHdian

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Hahaha, it never caused issues on my laptop when I was forced to. I am worried about the freezing, but have no idea what to do about it xD. I know computer systems and consoles do freeze sometimes, it seems to be a fact of life.
 
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InvalidError

InvalidError

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If the system is completely locked up, you do not really have any other choice anyway... you either hold the soft-power button until the PSU turns off, push the reset button or use the hard-switch on the back. In all three cases, the system shuts down without having a chance to finish whatever it was doing at the moment of the crash.

If that something happened to be updating file system structures, some files may get corrupted but as I said above, there is nothing any alternate shutdown method could do about it.

Whichever method you choose, the result should be the same.
 
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caqde

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It should be avoided if at all possible the things I would pay attention to are your HDD activity light if it is still flashing try to give your system time to respond otherwise using the reset button (if you have one) or holding down the power button are basically your last resort against lockups. But in either case it is always best afterwards to try and find out what caused your lockup which could be anything from bad software and/or drivers to hardware issues.
 
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drkatz42

drkatz42

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When your system freezes as you describe, not too many choices other than holding the power button. May be reasonable to have Windows perform an error check on the HD.
 
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MrCanEHdian

MrCanEHdian

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My Civ 5 save files corrupted, not much else seemed to happen.

So if you're forced to do this, should you expect some significant damage potentially? Or has technology surpassed that "limitation" that used to exist on old machines, where forced restarts could cause hardware issues or something?
 
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MrCanEHdian

MrCanEHdian

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Damn, I didn't even think about the HDD light. Is the reset button a better option than holding the power button, or does it not really matter? I have that option, just wondering. May I ask how you can find out what caused the lock up? Sounds tricky... Even impossible, since there are so many possibilities.. i'm not so good when it comes to software either.
 
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MrCanEHdian

MrCanEHdian

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How do you get Windows to check the HDD?
 
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MrCanEHdian

MrCanEHdian

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Great! Thanks for stopping by, your comments are always helpful and welcome.

I mean, it's usually in the process of doing something on Civ 5 so I lose that data, no biggie at all, but it kinda sucks a bit. I found out, or believe I have found out that the issue is the version of CoreTemp I downloaded. The last two times the system locked up, it happened when opening CoreTemp. I searched for known issues in their forums, and low and behold, loads and loads of people were talking about it back in 2013 sometime, all using Win7 or Win8.1. I found the temperatures on the CPU to be very satisfying, and uninstalled the program. I'll look around for a solution when I can and maybe re-download it.
 
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caqde

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I remember reading about the issue. The developer the last time I looked was looking into a way to fix the problem. Hopefully a new version will get posted in the near future that will have the fix for the bug in it. Then you can redownload the software and use it again. It probably used some code on your CPU that caused it to lockup. Which happens when there are bugs in those types of applications. Hopefully that was your issue and you won't have to lose any more progress in Civ 5. :)

EDIT: Found a post in a forum topic about that issue. If you go 4 up from the bottom you will see that on the 5th "The Coolest" as the developer is known as said that he is gonna try to get it out soon. It seems you can post in that topic or PM him for a test version but hopefully a release version will come out soon :)

http://www.alcpu.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=2569&start=125
 
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MrCanEHdian

MrCanEHdian

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I'm glad it's not a more serious issue. Losing progress sucks, but I'm just very happy to have a PC to game on instead of a boring old console like before haha.

Interesting, good to know. Thank you for your help! The program is very useful and cool, it would be nice to have around.
 
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