Just turn it off right after it shuts down before the OS starts booting again. (Or just turn it off whenever, it’s not like there’s much chance of filesystem corruption these days. Although there is a chance of registry corruption if you’re using windows and it’s updating, which is honestly worse to fix)
Modern Windows (and Linux) is very hard to kill. You can unplug it all day without issue. Registry corruption and similar issues have not been an issue in decades.
I had to recover a W10 box from a family members work after windows had slowly given itself cancer of file corruption. I’ve dealt with this shit before and it’s not a big deal… usually…
This fucker took 3 days of babysitting to bring back to life. In-place upgrades, it required multiple (why, no fucking idea), dism, sfc just chipping away bit by bit. And no, this is a work machine, so wipe and start fresh was reserved for actual “cannot be saved” situations. It has a backup plan, and I am the unofficial/unpaid IT guy for that location, but I don’t have license keys or installers for the software used (inherited situation), and it would add lots of friction to get running again. Absolutely not jumping on that grenade unless I must, it’s untested if a restore causes license validation errors (time checks and other bullshit).
After that fiasco I applied a universal scheded task of dism followed by sfc, on a monthly basis, and every six months a few automated checks but also I pop my head in for a minute (remotely) just to validate that those automated tasks are running successfully.
It’s been about… 4 years now? And it’s been working as-expected. But windows obliterating itself with no user input isn’t what I’d call ‘a thing of the past’.
(also it wasn’t a hardware fault)
