Question Shutting down the Win10 by hitting PC case power button is safe to do?

[danny009]

Hi, is it okay to turn off PC completely by hitting the pc case power button on front? 1-2 secs of pressing shuts down the Windows 10 yes? Not the 10 sec one. This can hurt my PSU? Is it basically the same thing clicking the shut down from Start yes? I'm not planning to do this often though, Thanks in advance,

 

[Gam3r01]

Its not going to cause any physical damage, as you arent actually "cutting" power directly (like unplugging it). It is not the same as clicking shut down, which waits for any pending writes and closes properly.
That said, if there is any data being written to storage, you run the risk of losing it or even corrupting the whole drive.

Why do you want to turn it off via the front button though? It physically takes longer than clicking shutdown.

 

[danny009]

Its not going to cause any physical damage, as you arent actually "cutting" power directly (like unplugging it). It is not the same as clicking shut down, which waits for any pending writes and closes properly.
That said, if there is any data being written to storage, you run the risk of losing it or even corrupting the whole drive.

Why do you want to turn it off via the front button though? It physically takes longer than clicking shutdown.

There is a specific game I'm playing everyday sadly it is filled with cheaters so prevent malware damage to my computer I thought quickly shutting down the pc is a good thing to prevent them accessing my system. Of course I have a good antivirus however it lacks of actual firewall and I don't want to rely on windows 10 itself firewall. Thank you for detailed and useful info, developers of this game got carried away with their other game so the one I play abandoned somesort, they issue maintanence updates events but thats it, they fix serious stuff like RCE but game itself lacks of good anti cheat,

I know I know I shouldnt be playing it, but it is one of the kind and I do love that game, it is Red Dead Redemption 2 Online, there is no game on the market like that,

 

[Gam3r01]

Cutting the power to your system isnt really going to prevent any malware from happening, if its going to happen in the first place.
You could easily close the game quicker than reaching down to your PC case.
If anything, just a hypothetical, you could also be stopping your AV software from doing its job, and the next time you turn on the PC the malware could install before your AV loads again.

 

[USAFRet]

Well, it could end up like this:

Question - Held the power button on PC to turn it off. Now it wants turn back on.

I was playing a game and my entire system froze. I couldn't AlT+F4, Ctrl+Alt+Del or Alt+Tab out. So I held the power button and turned it off. Now whenever I turn it on, it will turn on for a few seconds then turn off. Then turn back on and off. And keep doing this until I manually turn it off...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[kerberos_20]

if you just press front power button (without holding it, just light touch), then windows will properly shutdown
if you press it for 3+ seconds (configurable in bios), it will cut of power and you might loose data

 

[danny009]

Thanks all, I decided to not to do so, it is way too far levels for my extreme levels of paranoia. Thanks to lazy game developers and absurd wishes from Microsoft I became a paranoid for years now. Just mistakenly opened MS Edge, guess what happened, suddenly I have a very white eye hurting search box appeared with Bing AI logo because it quickly updated itself the moment I mistakenly clicked its icon. Spammed with pop ups and other bloatware wants me to choose as default browser. I ended up blocking its internet access via firewall and deleted all the MSEdgeUpdate EXEs from my computer. So sick of these things,

Anyways, my paid AV rans out its license in a few days anyways so I will use either free version of a Kaspersky or Bitdefender, either do not have a good detailed firewall and neither Windows security. But WS have that awesome ransomware protection literally blocks everything so I guess I just use that even its from Microsoft. I have no choice as I do know how firewall is vital these days. Perhaps it can cover up the firewall function.

Thank you all for the replies and feel free to further educate me in Windows Security features if you have time.

 

[Misgar]

If you aren't happy with the Windows Defender firewall, you could build or buy a pfSense (or similar) firewall and learn how to program rules to block port numbers of known offenders.

Given the speed at which computers execute commands, by the time you suspect a virus attack may be occurring, it could be too late to stop an infection. No firewall or antivirus software can be guaranteed to block all attacks, regardless of reviews that give some products a 100% rating.

If you have the Professional version of Windows, consider running your game in a Virtual Machine to provide isolation from the main OS, but you might find this impossible if the game requires direct access to the GPU.

 

[Karadjgne]

I've never seen any game that can transfer malware from cheaters. Cheating is a host pc hack which affects their game only, you just get to see the results. You do not have direct access to another's pc or vice versa, it's all going through the game server, which is highly firewalled and protected from outside influence.

Basically their cheats cannot affect your pc.

Shutdown through Windows or risk data loss/corruption as pushing the button has same consequences as pulling the plug. Sudden shutdown will not affect hardware, only software.