Yep, it's actually been kept for factory setups where the cases are designed to be in extremely loud and messy environments, also requiring quick basic troubleshooting. Hence, the old flick power switches are still used so at a glance you can initially see if the machine is on or off
There’s a Group Policy setting called ‘Do not turn off system power after a Windows system shutdown has occurred’ which can make it appear on any system you like.
It can be useful on certain UPS setups, if there’s a motherboard which doesn’t support the ‘Always On’ option after a power loss, only reverting to the ‘Last State’. I used to have a server like this.
No, I’ve only seen it on some specialized dual-system instrumentation computers, half RTOS and half Windows on an expansion card. I’m sure you could break windows bad enough to see it for yourself.
It did take the IBMoid PC world 'til the mid '90s to start making machines that could turn themselves off; then it took a few years more for the feature to become ubiquitous.
Meanwhile, it puzzled me that the early '90s PPC Macs had hard power switches, after the Mac II line, in the late '80s, had soft power.
They aren't conservative more so just lazy, by fully removing it it would cause errors with other legacy code already in windows and I assume they just don't want to delete stuff to not cause more errors and more bug fixing
I'd call it conservative. If they change it, they might directly or indirectly break something for a percentage of their user-base and when you're Windows a percentage of users is a Czech republic and then some, and what they break might not even be a codebase Microsoft owns.
I remember that massage, that was so long ago and beautiful times to see computer technology grow every year. Os was becoming better and better with each year too . We actually were so happy and excited to install newly os back then.
This dialog box was a design problem. People would click “Restart” and were perplexed as to why the shutdown command wouldn’t turn their PCs off. In fact, one such perplexed user persisted on his behavior even after Chen told him.
So, the Windows team decided that the “Restart” button was misleading. People were receiving wrong signs because they were trained to behave a certain way toward dialog boxes.
The message in Win9X is an optical illusion; I believe there's a DOS prompt hidden behind it and if you type the right commands, you'll get a visible C:\ prompt.
There's an app called Windows Enabler that lets you click on disabled buttons. Some apps are coded so that the button still does the thing, but greyed out so you can't click on it. It's one of those things that's so fucking dumb that it shouldn't work, but... it does.
Anyway, I wonder what would happen if you tried clicking on that close button with Windows Enabler running...
Interesting experiment! this gave me the idea to try F4 on that dialog and it triggered a restart, there's a good chance that clicking that close button would do the same.
True. It must have been the opposite way. With the DOS based Windowses i could shut down without the closing procedure. I remember using that as a sort of Undo button, But not with Windows XP any more. XP being NT based. I cannot remember what was the program that I used.
<MEMORY FROM THE STONE AGE> 3,1 closed to "Windows has been shut down", Win95 to "It's now safe to turn off your computer" and then you could turn the power switch to off position.</MEMORY FROM THE STONE AGE>
From the good old days of AT power supplies when computers were turned ON/OFF with a physical power switch. At that time, the computer could not yet be turned off programmatically like with current ATX standard power supplies.
At that time, a turned off computer consumed 0W of electricity because the power switch completely disconnected the AC lines, unlike today's computers where 5v standby power is always active.
more importantly, it didn't hide your applications and their 'save' dialogs that popped up after it attempted to close them. at some point some bright spark thought it would be a good idea to hide all that, so now we just have to wait looking at a blank screen until it times out and tells us that some application is preventing shutdown.
The point of this post was to show that early versions of Windows NT sites that message as a dialogue box, not the orange text on a black screen. You just tried to tell everybody that Windows 9x did the same thing. Which it did not.
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u/Abbers75 Jun 06 '26
It is possible to install a newer APM enabled HAL.DLL file into Windows NT4 so that it will shutdown and power off.