How to turn off a computer

It's very hit and miss when you are in that situation.

Sometimes you've just got to pull the plug and hope all is well when the power is stable enough to restart.  If it has got to the point where Checkdisk is running it would be best to let it finish if it can but if the power goes again just pull the plug while it is down.

The only sure way of dealing with that scenario is to have a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) to buy enough time to finish what you are doing and exit gracefully.

57Gregy


I would give Jonbouy a Helpful thingy too, but I don't know how much it will cost.

Better safe than sorry...

Bub


I just thought of another way to turn off a computer ... tell it it's fat and ugly.

Well, I just undress in front of my computer. That turns it off immediately.

bapu

Bub


I just thought of another way to turn off a computer ... tell it it's fat and ugly.

Well, I just undress in front of my computer. That turns it off immediately.

Do you call out 'Jonbouy' to turn it on again?

I like to be in the shower and using the telephone during lightning storms.....


Hello?   Hello?  Can you hear me now?

If your house gets a direct hit...all bets are off anyway. Even if you unplug everything.

A few years back a veterinarian doctor's house took a direct hit. It burned to the ground. Unplugging won't help that.

Like a good neighbor, state farm was there and he has rebuilt.

Fixed


A 'nother good reason to use a laptop. They are generally immune to power outages.
But going "off the grid" will save your butt too, unless you take a direct hit which I have had. It blew the submersible pump controller box apart and telephone box off the side of the house. Some of the phone lines were melted. The house smelled of Ozone and melting plastic. The TV never worked again.

jackn2mpu

Old55


Once everything is shut down--even with a UPS, it's a good idea to disconnect all physical connections to the outside world.  When you have that kind of electrical activity going on, you might also want to disconnect your LAN/PHONE or CABLE connections, too.  Any connection to the outside world has the potential to cause damage. 

The one system you wouldn't have to do that with is something like Verizon FIOS which is fiber optic to the house. No copper path so no lightning path that way. Of course there's still the power supply for the termination box attached to one's house.

The problem becomes one of how much do you go about your house unplugging things?

You're correct about the FIOS--or any fiber optic for that matter.  If you use a surge suppressor or a UPS, you can probably get away with unplugging two or three cables.  For most storms it probably wouldn't be necessary--up it's still you gambling that you won't get a direct hit.  In the case of the 57Gregy, where the was a lot of lightning going for a long time I would definitely disconnect every damned wire I had in the house.  

Jonbouy

slartabartfast 



I personally have never invested in a UPS and never lost data or hardware as a result of a power failure.  I may have been lucky and some of that may be down to the UK electrical system being cleaner, nevertheless we have our fair share of outages due to storms.
.

IMO the storms are not the biggest risk, because you usually see them coming. Of course, a severe power surge caused by a lightning is another thing , but...
 
I guess in the UK you have much less of such sparsely inhabited areas which don't have multiple power main lines than in the USA. When an area get power from several sources it can keep the power more stable.
 
Here in sparsely populated Finland (and I think in many areas of the USA) there are lots of places where the disturbance in one power line can't be patched by another. For example, where I live, during the bird migrations we get weekly power drop outs of 1-3 seconds when birds fly between the high voltage wires and get fried by the electric arcs. Those are something that come quite unexpectedly, as do the ones caused by the banked snow falling from an upper wire on the lower one.
 
I'm playing high poker: My music-hobby room doesn't have grounded outlets, so I can't use UPS. So far so good. I guess I'm in that room more seldom than birds migrate...sigh. It's been my "intention" for twenty years to get the grounding but if I wait for a few years more, I don't need to care :o/

In my experience....working in the electric & security business, surges happen every day. A storm is just the Big Cheeze.

Most of the damage I see to my security systems comes in through the phone lines. Electrical systems seem to be very well grounded (as per codes that are enforced) but the phone system has a smaller ground and in some cases has no ground that is usable or effective. Most damage also occurs in the country where there are fewer grounding points per a given distance as opposed to the suburban areas where there might be dozens if not hundreds of grounding points in the utility system in the same distance.

Even though your outlets are the NON-grounded type, a UPS will still work and provide "coast through" power to the computer and studio gear on a power outage or blink.

Here in NC (USA) we can get blinks in the middle of the day with blue skies.  If a car hits a pole or a tree falls on the line, you can get outages, and even a huge surge if the event causes the primary transformer feeders running at 14, 700 volts to contact the lower voltage cables below them on the way down.  Hit the power supplies in your gear with 14.7kv ...actually anything over 240v on a 120v line and you got toasted gear..... doesn't go well with butter and jam either....

I had a voltage surge device on my line for years that latched a light on for anything 30% over the rated voltage of 120v. There wasn't a single day that I didn't come home to find it latched on.

USE SURGE PROTECTION and a UPS on all the gear you love.

Jonbouy

USE SURGE PROTECTION and a UPS on all the gear you love.

That's not you is it Herb?

You sound like one of those pesky, meddling government health and safety official types here that insist on prescribing what they decree is best for me despite my personal evidence to the contrary...

I agree with the phone lines being a bigger problem as equipment using the phone lines is only 12v DC rated (UK) and therefore obviously much more vulnerable to being fried by a surge.

But it would have been uneconomical for me to own either surge protection or a UPS or even a combined solution, so the jury is out on that one for me.  I can still afford to lose say a motherboard and a couple of hard drives and I'd still be in pocket over the price of a UPS.

I appreciate the cautionary stance though...

Are you saying an ups would be more expensive than a motherboard & a couple of hard drives? I find that hard to believe.