Shutting down a PC can get complicated. Sometimes Windows takes
an extremely long time to close, and too often the operating
system doesn't shut down at all.  Microsoft says if you turn off
your PC without first shutting down Windows, your hard drive
could become more fragmented, files could become corrupted, and
you could lose data. But according to a PCWorld report, it is
safe to turn off a Windows computer without doing a shut down.
We ran 30 iterations of an informal test, turning off a pair of
systems running Windows XP without first shutting down Windows.
Each time we left documents open in Word, Outlook, and Quicken.
And we left our Internet connection up and running.  After we
turned each PC back on, we ran Symantec's Norton Disk Doctor and
the Windows disk checker to see if the hard drive had suffered
any ill effects. We reopened the applications that we had left
running and reconnected to the Internet. Disk Doctor found no
disk errors, and files were intact--at least up to the last time
they were sa