Windows 98 now safe to turn off computer

First post, by eric Posted on , Joined , Location California, MD. Rank Newbie. Posts Posted on , Merovign Offline User metadata Posts Rank Member. Kind of depends how hardware-hacky you are. Location USA. Rank l33t. Location Australian but living in the UK for now. RetroLizard Offline User metadata Posts This admittedly might be a bit of a late reply, but I'm looking for the same thing as OP. Any tips? Aragorn Offline User metadata Posts Andrew T.

Offline User metadata Posts Location Thunder Bay, Canada. Andrew T wrote: I like the soothing visual image of Win9x's "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen, and I also like how the user has the ability to reboot the machine from this screen or reconfigure Windows to shut down to the DOS prompt instead.

Go to top of page Go to top of page. Close window. Power management was one of those newfangled thingies that only the fancy-pants computers supported. This message was displayed when shutdown was complete and the computer did not support software-initiated power-off. You can hit the power button now. Comments are closed. I wrote a book Ground rules Disclaimers and such My necktie's Twitter. April 19th, Read next Why are mouse wheel messages delivered to the focus window instead of the window under the mouse?

No hardware manufacturer was dominant enough either. Various ad hoc consortia were created, e. In the early nineties, surprising as it may seem now, there was a fair amount of uncertainty as to what the computing future held. Apple was making its comeback with cheaper Macs, workstation manufacturers were releasing lower-priced systems or rather, not-so-expensive systems , a variety of operating systems and platforms were vying for attention Be, RiscPC APM is now obsolete, and ACPI is the interface which provides access to the power state nowadays and many other aspects of the system.

PCs never acquired the other hardware feature I wanted from Macs and Unix workstations, which was the ability to eject floppies without human intervention. Oh well Until Windows 95, all power switches were that - a switch. On or off, nothing else, and there was no "self shut-off". Nor was there a requirement for it. The advent of Windows 95 and the possibility of the system saving state before shutting down cleanly created a market requirement for power-off to be controlled by software.

This led to the development of the standardised ACPI interface and ATX power supplies to implement the new requirement, a year after Win95 had exposed the need for it. Hence the famous message. The versions of Windows that displayed that message used the FAT filesystem.

FAT does not have any atomic write capability - that is, if power is lost while data is being written it can corrupt the filesystem. This was such a common problem that Microsoft included a tool chkdsk that would detect and attempt to fix it every time the machine booted. To avoid this happening users were told not to simply turn their computers off. Other systems around at that time, such as the Amiga, Mac and DOS based PCs, could simply be turned off when the user was finished using them, with a few caveats such as waiting for floppy drive lights to go out.

Windows 95 introduced virtual memory and write caching for performance reasons, which required a clean shut down to avoid filesystem corruption. Since older AT machines could not power themselves off like newer ATX ones could, Windows would display this message when it was ready to be switched off. This was purely a PC thing. Also as they were missing HDs, you could switch them off anytime risking only to break the current floppy if it was just written to.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. It's now safe to turn off your computer Ask Question. Asked 3 years, 6 months ago. Active 1 year, 4 months ago. Viewed 41k times. Improve this question. I suddenly feel very old. If this is what makes you feel old, you're way overdue for feeling old. COM before turning off the power. The message is still dangerously wrong.

How does it know? This is Steve's computer. My computer is on the other side of the room. Ah well, I guess it's safe to go power it off Show 11 more comments.