I do not have the theory behind why shutting Windows down improperly (via the
power switch, the reset button, or CTRL-ALT-DEL) corrupts Windows system files,
but I can tell you from experience that over time it absolutely does.

I have a lot of Windows 95 clients (customers).  Those clients who follow my
advice and who reboot a minimum of once a day (allowing Windows 95 to perform
its housekeeping tasks on a regular basis) experience very few problems of any
kind.

Those customers who reboot less frequently experience semi-regular "freezes"
and illegal page faults.  Over a period of time -- 3 months, 6 months, 9 months
-- these customers regularly come up with registry errors, "dll not found"
messages, and other errors that are most easily fixed by re-installing Win95.
 They also encounter ever-increasing "freezes" and illegal page faults. And,
they have invariably found that Windows runs a lot faster after the reinstall.

And customers who (I later found out) regularly turned off Win95 mechanically
(as opposed to using the Start button/Shutdown routine), run into similar
corrupt registry and error messages as described above, but in much less time,
also necessitating a Win95 reinstall.

Again, I don't know the theory, but my user base is quite large, and these
behaviors are quite consistent. (Keeping in mind there are exceptions to all of
this -- I'm only talking about consistency and trends, not absolutes!)

Roxanne Pierce
R2 Systems, San Diego
mailto:[log in to unmask]

On Saturday, March 07, 1998 10:25, Jim Meagher [SMTP:[log in to unmask]] wrote:
> Roy Schriftman, MS, MBA wrote:
> >
> > Window 95 uses disk caching as a built-in feature. Therefore, when you save
> > any file the file is written to the disk cache and not to the disk drive.
>
> I don't believe that's exactly true.  The disk cache is mainly used
> by windows for storing frequently used DLLs, TMPs, and other such
> "housekeeping" files.  A USER/DATA file will probably pass through
> the cache -momentarily- but it does not stay there.
>
<snip>
>
> If you shut off the power to the computer without shutting down windows,
> you will prevent windows from performing it's housekeeping routines, and
> you will truncate and/or orphan a lot of -=temporary=- files, but I
> really doubt that it would require a reinstall of windows.