[Neutrino]

A hard shutdown is very very unlikely to kill a hard drive in a physical sense. Sure it can damage system files as I mentioned in my earlier post but not trash the HD. Modern HDs have very good protection systems that will park the head in milliseconds and initiate a proper spindown. They are so good as to even protect against moderate drops. Furthermore all modern computers adhere to the ATX standard which unlike the old AT does no physically cut the power to the system. To do so you need to either unplug the power cable or flip the PSU switch.


If you would like to keep an eye out for your drives physical health just make sure SMART is enabled in the bios and then use a program that can read its data. Smartfan is one of my favorite SMART readers.

Anyway venture, the default admin setup is Microsoft's fault for not setting up proper user privileges system as in UNIX. They promised this in Vista so we can only hope.

As far as the system not having a restore disk that is quite ridiculous, OEM builders are getting worse and worse. There is a chance they might have placed a hidden partition the HD to restore the system from, except normally that partition is accessed from some sort of an emergency disk in case of total OS failure.