So the charging unit on my laptop has died which means I’m effectively lugging around a laptop without a battery. I had a circumstance tonight when I needed to go somewhere and the computer wasn’t shutting down fast enough so I yanked out the power cord while it was in the “Windows is shutting down” phase. Later, I was wondering if it might have been better to close down as many programs as possible and then yank the cord while on the desktop.
Can you harm your computer doing either? If so, which is more likely to cause harm?
I don’t think you’ll cause your computer any physical harm. In older computers, you were likely to damage the hard drive by removing it under power before the hard drive had a chance to park the heads. These days drives are designed to handle power failures without self destructing.
However, you might cause yourself software errors. Files may not be closed properly, and data that is cached might not get a chance to be permenantly stored. You might lose some data on your drive, and you might make one or more of your programs stop functioning properly. Worst case, you could hose a file needed by the operating system and require a reformat and reinstall to fix it.