How to properly shut down windows system

There are some processes and apps that are running in the background. When you shut down a computer using the Start Menu, those programs and apps are allowed to close properly before shutting down. Pressing the power button stops those processes in the middle of what they were doing and may cause corruption or Bad Sectors on your SSD/HDD because it was not shut down properly.

Depends what the power button is configured to do, and whether you mean press an hold the power button for 5s or so.

The power button could configured to shut down the system safely if you press it once, briefly, for example:



Then consider what your PC might be doing at the time.
If it is busy writing to the disk and you force a shutdown (by holding the power button down for long enough) you coudl end up with a right mess on your disk/.

If it is processing a update or upgrade you could end up with an unbootable PC.

For systems where fast access to data is prefered, I would always recommend setting the short press to hibernate - this is a medium fast shutdown where the current state of the system is saved to disk. also you could, if you wish, then take the system to another location and when started it will boot to the place you were when you shut down originally

makhan10 said:

When i press the power button only for one second it shutdown immediately

So I assume that's what you have set it to do in Power options, Choose what the power buttons do, When I press the power button
[shown in dalchina's diagram above]

You can also shut it down correctly by using a shortcut to

Code:

shutdown.exe /s /t 0 /f

Shutdown - SS64


Forcing it off by keeping the power button down for several seconds should only be done if you have no choice because, say, the system has frozen.
It's not really RAM that is put at risk by improper shutdowns but the currently-logged-in user account's profile.
- Windows consolidates changes only when signing off and that's part of shutdown.
- If Windows does not get the chance to consolidate changes properly then the profile might be put back together incorrectly & the user account might fail to work properly or might refuse attempts to log into it.
- I create spare Admin accounts to help recover from the effects of this my ditty - Create two spare local, password-protected Admin accounts [post #2] in Windows 10, 11 - TenForums
- This corruption was frequently reported in Windows 7 but is not so common these days.


All the best,
Denis