Occasionally, here and elsewhere, discussing computer problems it is suggested to shutdown using ‘‘power off’’. [Before PCs this was common practice on the Control Data machines also.] How does one ‘‘power off’’ a laptop with a battery? Must the battery be removed? Is this folk lore and ''power off is unnecessary?
Generally, a reboot is all that is necessary.
Even a “warm” reboot, where the power doesn’t go off will reset almost all the circuitry.
A shutdown/reboot will occasionally fix things like a faulted USB port.
Removing the battery is almost never necessary. (I won’t say never, because I suppose there could be some time when the BIOS got corrupted, and needed to be reset to some known state, but that is very, very rare).
On a Windows PC, one clicks on the Start button and selects “Shut down” to power off the computer. You can also select “Restart”, which shuts down the system and then powers it up again.
There are some occasions where the start menu is unavailable, or shutdown/restart hangs. Sometimes even Ctrl-Alt-Delete -> Power Options -> Shutdown doesn’t work. In these cases, I find holding the power button on my laptop for 3-5 seconds triggers the shutdown process. Only if none of these work do I resort to a “hard” shutdown by removing the battery. I think I’ve had to do a hard shutdown on my laptops once or twice in the past 10 years or so.
If you press the power button and hold it down for a few seconds, that will trigger Windows to do a shutdown, but that requires Windows and its power related drivers to be working properly. If Windows has completely gone wonky, on most laptops you can hold down the power button for something like 15 to 20 seconds to force a hardware shutdown.
Sometimes the power control hardware can go a little wonky too. In that case, removing the battery and unplugging the laptop will definitely shut it down.
ETA: Holding down the power button for 15 seconds or so works on desktops, too.
I have to do this sometimes with this little notebook thing I’ve been using since my hard drive died on my “real” computer.
Sometimes it just won’t respond to anything. Usually after clicking on links in Straight Dope threads.
Unplug, remove battery is the only way to get it back.
Your terminology is a bit confusing. Do you mean a shutdown, or disconnecting the power? A shutdown and a restart are basically equivalent in what they do. If anything, a shutdown is worse, as in Windows 8+, it doesn’t do a complete shutdown, but does partial hibernation. You’re better off doing a restart if you’re having problems.
If you mean disconnecting the power, you can almost always press and hold the power button. I’ve never had to hold it as long as engineer_comp_geek suggests, though. But I’ve never had a laptop that required me to press and hold to get the device to do a normal shutdown.
That’s something for tablets and phones, as the power button also doubles as a “turn off the screen” button. On a laptop, you can close it instead.