PC Freezing when shutting down via power button.

[Turtle]

Okay, so if I so a software shutdown through windows, everything shuts down fine 100% of the time.  However, if I use the power button to tell windows to shut down, it'll freeze about 80% of the time.  Usually in the process it screws up some setting files somewhere which results in all my firefox settings and bookmarks getting destroyed.

Anyone heard of this problem before?

[unbreakable]

Check what the power button is programmed to do.  Sometimes it's set to put the computer on standby or hibernate, and both of those suck.

[Blackjack]

I'm new here, I assume Turtle's got his power button figured out OK.

If you go to (for Windows XP):
>Control Panel
>>Power Option (Click this)
>>>Advanced tab
>>>>Power Buttons (drop down menu): This lets you set what the power button does. One of the options is "do nothing," so if the power button causes problems, that might be worth using as a setting (esp. if friends or family share the computer and don't realize using the power button to shut down causes problems).

Just posting this for my own reminder, cause it was news to me.

[unbreakable]

Probably another good thing to remember is that most computers will do a "hard shutdown" if you hold down the powerbutton for about five seconds.  This is really useful, especially if the computer is hung up and you don't feel like yanking the power cord.

[Turtle]

Yeah, I'll probably set my power button to do nothing until I figure it out.  If anything it's probably something like me accidently turning off some power management setting in the BIOS.