Comments on: How To Shutdown a Computer

By: spndr

spndr — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:50:38 +0000

stop ranting about something meaningless, if your so bothered about not shuting down quick enough go buy a pen and paper and shut the fuck up.

By: rpggames

rpggames — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:52:41 +0000

Very interesting, i agree, it’s about time we get rid of the long shutdown process. People got used to things and large business just don’t see why they should give us for free something most don’t request. But we won’t go further if we stick to the old ways of doing things, like saving documents (hard drive space is not limited to a few hundred megabytes anymore) or turning the computer off. Great article, i think some decision makers in OS business should read it!

By: Bobby

Bobby — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:56:45 +0000

I never turn my PC off.
That solves half the problem.

By: Tom Anderson

Tom Anderson — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:40:51 +0000

Mark Thornton Says:
January 18th, 2009 at 4:47 am “While Vista does enter (hybrid) sleep quite quickly (and once started there is no cancel), I have a growing catalog of state which is not restored reliably. The timing of reestablishing external devices is fragile — e.g. monitors that don’t come back on because the graphics card decides they aren’t there any more…”

No, it’s not perfect, but Vista’s sleep is much much better than XP’s. Yes my monitors don’t always come on, and explorer.exe crashes from time to time, but actually I have about a 98% success rate with sleep. This is definitely a direction for continued work, IMO. As it is, I always use sleep with my notebook computer. It is really great–close the lid and it’s (usually) sleeping. Throw it in the bag and then I’m off. A couple minutes or hours later, hit the power button and five seconds later everything is back the way it was.

And once a week or maybe more often, I do turn off my computer all the way…

By: eleg

eleg — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:47:47 +0000

Have a look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevayler

http://www.prevayler.org/

By: Steve Walker

Steve Walker — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:01:54 +0000

Psion managed this as early as the early 1991 with the Series 3, followed by 3a, 3C, 5, 7 and Netbook. It was something that I always appreciated – you never had to remember to save anything because it worked on flash memory (or some such geek speak) and you could just turn it off. Some elements of this remain in Symbian phones today, which is nice when you find it. It’s ridiculous IMHO that PCs and Macs, more than a quarter century after their birth, remain so fragile when it comes to the likelihood of losing data in a system crash.

By: dog

dog — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:31:49 +0000

We had this back in the 80s. On my apple ][c I would just turn the machine off and it was off.
I don’t see what the big deal is.. all these filesystem caches should be more aggressive in writing back the data to disk on idle.. Sure.. make me wait a few 100 ms, but other than that it should be instantaneous.

I don’t care so much about restoring that is what sleep/hibernate are for (though they too could be faster). Why is a cold boot bad? It wasn’t so in the days of ProDOS.

By: simplemind

simplemind — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:59:26 +0000

the simplest thing is to not put the computer/labtop on at all.
this avoids any problem with switching it off.
even more …

By: Lazy bastard

Lazy bastard — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:28:03 +0000

In my future, here’s how shutdown should work:You just say shutdown aloud.That’s it.

By: Thomas Sherer

Thomas Sherer — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:35:36 +0000

I bought OS/2 Warp way back when it was first released. I was editing something using its bundled text editor when the power went out. I was anxious because I had not saved my file yet and feared I would have to start all over. When the power came back on, so did my computer. There was no long boot sequence or other nonsense, and the screen appeared almost exactly as it was when the power failed, text editor, document and all, maybe I lost one or two characters. I took this as a sign that the PC had finally come of age, as that was just the sort of behavior which I had become accustomed to having been a mainframe user for almost 20 years. Its a really simple trick for an operating system which uses virtual memory. The reason we don’t have this feature in all computers today might be because amateurs have been designing our operating systems. This goes for Windows, OS/X and Linux. Linux being the only one with any excuse for this at all!