Pressing power button breaks computer?

[andrewboon]

I went to control panel and I set it so that whenever I press the physical power button on my tower, it puts the computer to sleep. My friend said that this will eventually damage my computer, but I don't believe him. What do you guys think? Also does this also apply if I set the power button to shut down the computer? To hibernate? etc. Thanks for your thoughts!

 

[biostud]

no, it will not damage your computer. It's probably not a good idea to do hard shut downs as the preferred way of turning your computer off, but who would do that anyways?

 

[andrewboon]

What's the difference between a hard shut down and me pressing shutdown on the start menu?

 

[DominionSeraph]

What's the difference between a hard shut down and me pressing shutdown on the start menu?

A hard shutdown would be holding in your power button for 2 seconds so the computer just turns off (or yanking the plug). Windows doesn't like that.

None of the power button options is a hard shutdown. Setting it to sleep or shut down is fine.
To very simply answer your original question: Your friend is an idiot and around 10 years out of date.

 

[corkyg]

Without the 2-4 second press for a hard shutdown, you would then have to resort to a power box switch or pull the plug. This is the path when your mouse and keyboard become non-responsive. Sleep can be setup on the task bar if you really want it on tap like that.

 

[mfenn]

I went to control panel and I set it so that whenever I press the physical power button on my tower, it puts the computer to sleep. My friend said that this will eventually damage my computer, but I don't believe him. What do you guys think? Also does this also apply if I set the power button to shut down the computer? To hibernate? etc. Thanks for your thoughts!

Your friend doesn't know what he's talking about. As others have mentioned, there is a world of difference between tapping the power button and holding it down for several seconds.

Just tapping the power button doesn't do anything to the hardware, it just sends a signal to the OS that the button was pressed. Tapping the power button is absolutely no different than clicking the Sleep, Shutdown, Hibernate, or whatever in Windows.

Holding it down so that the system powers down hard can potentially lead to data corruption if you were in the middle of something. Even that is rare in the age of journaled file systems though.