How long do you need to hold down the power button to turn off a PC?

My guess; server and consumer motherboards are very different. BMCs log a lot of data and on startup if the OS driver reads the log it can put whatever it wants in the crashdump. Consumer motherboards mostly only store the reason for last poweroff which the OS can read on next boot. Server MBs may also have a longer timeout before cutting power from a long-press.

Apparently from standby the power-off time on some laptops is much longer and you get a MANUALLY_INITIATED_POWER_BUTTON_HOLD which kicks off in the ~8 seconds from the article.

Could the confusion be that the 12 seconds only apply when the OS fails to respond to the power-down request? I recall struggling with laptops stuck in a boot loop, and it did pay off to hold the power-down button a little longer.

What about modern devices (such as laptops) that have a fixed battery? They shouldn’t rely totally on software to force a hard power off because that’s not safe. If the software hangs you cannot power down

Looks like Microsoft forgot to talk to hardware manufacturers about this feature...

until it stops making noise :|

suposedly the sepc for ATX was mentioing 4 seconds. But today's laptops take way longer.

My own PC doesn't take long at all to power off, although I know that for example on Lenovo laptops you need to hold that power button for quite long, I may count it next time I do it :)

My desktop, which has an Asus motherboard but doesn't have Windows installed on it, also takes in the 3-4 seconds range for a hard shutdown. I would have assumed that it is entirely hardware-dependent and the OS hasn't much to do with it. On my Macbook Air I just counted 5 for a hard shutdown.

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