There is a right and wrong way to shut your computer down or restart it. Most of the time this isn’t a problem and you know how to shutdown properly. But sometimes you just don’t have a choice, and need to hard shutdown your computer.

The easiest way to do this is just hold down the power for 8 seconds, wait for it to stop or restart, and then maybe wait 30 seconds before starting it up again.

The reason we shutdown out computer properly is to close down any working systems and databases, and to make sure no data or systems are damaged. This is a process and forcfully stop your computer to compromise your system and hardware.

It is not unusual to pull an external hard drive out of a computer rather than removing it through the USB utility and not be able to see your external the next time you plug it in.

Reasons to stop your computer abruptly

There aren’t a lot of reasons to stop your computer the wrong way when it is running.

Sometime people can take control of your screen and might be getting into something you don’t want them to like private documents, changing passwords or baking, financial etc.

A better thing to do would be to turn your internet or modem off, turn off the WIFI or pull the Ethernet out of the back. But you might be in such a hurry, you just shut it down.

The other reason most people hard shutdown their computer is because it has frozen.

Your computer might no be frozen

A lot of the time when you think your computer is frozen it is not, it is just running very very slow.

Sometimes it can be doing an update, a virus scan, a particular program can be resource intensive or you might even have a computer virus.

Rather than just forcing your computer to restart, you can go to control-alt-delete and see which applications are using the most resources. This will also take a little time because your computer is running slow already, but might be a much better alternative to hard shutting down your computer or laptop.

Other ways to shut down your computer

There are a number of ways to start your computer.

If you computer is non responsive you can always pull the power out of the back if it is a desktop. I don’t advise this but sometimes you might not have any alternative.

If you have a laptop you might be able to hold the power button down for about 8 seconds which will recycle your sessions.

If you can, i like to leave my computer off for a minute to drain it of any residual electricity circulating around the circuits and components.