NT's normal shutdown is started by pressing Alt-Ctrl-Del and clicking on the Shutdown button on the Logon Information dialog screen. NT flushes buffers and closes all open files. This is a safe shutdown. NT does everything it can to insure that no data is lost. If you pull the power plug, any unsaved data, that is data in active memory which has not been written to a file is LOST. There is a small possibility of NT not rebooting after a powerloss. If you need to shutdown NT and you do not want the unsaved contents of applications to be written to files or logs, you can do an emergency shutdown without the risk of corrupting NT. There will also be no message written to the event log beyond the normal shutdown events. To emergency shutdown NT:

• Press Alt-Ctrl-Del
• When the Logon Information dialog screen appears, hold down the Ctrl key and click on the Shutdown button
• The following warning message pops up:

  If you continue, your machine will reboot and any unsaved data will be lost. Use this only as a last resort.

• Click OK and NT will perform an emergency rapid shutdown.

This functionality is the same for Windows NT and Windows 2000.