I did not know whether this posting should go under Hardware or Windows Vista, so I figured Hardware was better. Back in the day of the 486 I remember if Windows froze, and there was nothing that could be done I would hit the power button and the computer would instantly turn off. Now with my Dell 4600, and most modern computers (if not all) the power button has to be held for about 5-10 seconds, for it to do a shut down. Anyways this now leads to my question, last night I was logging out of a User Account on Windows Vista, and it said “Logging Off” and the circular thing was moving in the center. I came back 20 minutes later still “Logging Off”, another 20 minutes still “Logging Off” so I pressed various keys on my keyboard, nothing, I pressed my power button once, nothing. The circular thing in the Center was still moving, but nothing was happening. Anyways long story short, I held the power button for about 10 seconds and it shut down, than when I booted back up it said “Windows did not shut down correctly” I choose start normally and it started. Now can this create bad Clusters on the hard Drive by doing this? Thank you, Jesse

Yes, Vista and many other OS's do not use a special type of file system that protects against this. Unless you know you are on a fully journaled file system then you run a risk. The good news is XP and above use some protection. One thing may be to use hard drive settings that write to disk and not cache it but it slows down the system a bit. As always consider using restore points, backups and other means to recover your computer. About the only OS I have ever seen not have any issues is was QNX. Don't know why. We could crash then every day. Once in a while a drive would die but almost never a file issue. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you goober.