Are You Killing Your PC by Doing this One Common Thing?

January 24th, 2013 Tags: bad shutdowns
Posted in Spyware Prevention

Getting some spyware on your computer is as common as the cold these days, but there are some spyware prevention techniques to help prevent spyware infections. But if you get infected, don’t make it worse by doing this one common, but deadly thing to your computer. This is not new news. If you have read my previous blog posts, you already know that I have warned about this problem before. It goes like this:

• PC Gets Infected
• PC Gets Slow
• PC Freezes
• Owner performs hard shutdown with power button
• Owner boots up again
• PC Freezes again
• Owner performs hard shutdown with power button
• Owner boots up again
• PC Freezes again
• Owner performs hard shutdown with power button……………………

The Power Button is “NOT” a Miracle FIX-IT Button!

First of all, I know you don’t want to leave your computer on indefinitely so you eventually have to turn it off the “FIRST” time it freezes. But it still makes me cringe to do this even once, but it is like setting a broken bone, it has to be done and it is going to hurt.

The next thing I hear is, “Then what do I do?” To put it simply, GET IT FIXED! And of the ones that do bring them in for repair after the first instance of the problem, the first thing they want to show me is that it freezes after you turn it on. A bad shutdown is a bad shutdown, no matter if it was intentional or not, nor if you are just just showing a PC Tech that it will in fact freeze so he can exchange a meaningful glance with  you. A good PC Tech will probably boot it up with a Live-CD to bypass your infected Operating System so that he can checkout your Windows installation without it freezing.

Proper Windows Shutdown

When you properly Shut Down your computer, the Hard Drive parks the read/write head in a Safe Landing Zone. If you were to abruptly shutdown your computer while the drive was spinning, especially while data was being accessed, the read/write head might come into contact with the spinning platter which holds your data. This is known as a crash and can cause permanent damage to your hard drive and you may lose data, not to mention adding more to your repair bill for a new hard drive. Even if this warning was made into some sort of “Amber Alert”, people will still perform repeated hard shutdowns when their computer freezes. I guess we should thank these ones for the extra business.

But if You Must Try Anyway…

If you must try to boot your computer up again after it freezes, at least attempt to boot it up in the Safe Mode. From the Safe Mode, Windows may be stable enough to correct whatever may have been causing Windows to freeze in the first place. I suggest you check the Hard Drive for File System errors with chkdsk and to run some malware scans.

Anyway, none of this info is new and virtually every PC Tech should be aware of this issue. As for consumers, its the big secret they don’t want to hear. If you put a monkey in from of a typewriter, he will eventually type a real word. But  put a consumer in front of a frozen computer, he or she will invariably hit the power button over and over, making the problem worse. Facts are facts, but these ones can take comfort in how they are helping the global economy. Namely, all those hard drive factories in Thailand, the Philippines and China.