Single Button ON/OFF, Damage to PC?

[babydickonboard]

I was just wondering what you guys think about "hard" shutdowns of a pc while in mame. (i.e. pulling the powerplug) I want to wire everything in my cab up to a single switch, and have the pc set to restore power after failure. I'm a bit worried about the computer on shut down tho. I'm sure that MAME isn't writing much at the time, but im worried about my HDD crashing.

I was looking through the forum, and someone was talking about decreasing winXP HDD cache write  thru device manager->disk drive->property's->policy. I was just wondering if anyones had any troubles with there PCs doing this, or if there are some other things you've done to help prevent damage.

-thanks

[mhermann]

This isn't a concrete answer but I was always under the assumption that as long as the hard drive was not being written to you were ok. So with Mame I guess the only writing would be to a high score file. SO as long as you exit out to your front end I would think you would be fine.

[paigeoliver]

I have had Mame machines that have endured hard power-offs for years and years with no errors. A mame cabinet isn't writing a thing other than high score files.

[babydickonboard]

thats what I was thinking too, I just wanted to be sure cause I want everything hooked up to one master switch thats tied to my powerstrip.  I was think that I was going to have to get/make a smartstrip, but this should work.  Thanks for the input!